Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for April 17, 2015

Kid is as dumb as a brick. Once you see a rubber band gun how hard is it make your own? There are no real moving parts. Or he can just move on to his next destructive mode of living.

and he still doesn’t talk!

He’ll be distracted soon. Don’t worry about the attention span of a three year old.

Who needs a gun? We always used our fingers….

And don’t make him any slingshots, either.

To be fair, Max barely talks at all.

I see now.

In fact since he doesn’t talk, a ‘silent treatment’ or ‘cold shoulder’ is pretty meaningless!

Never had a rubber band gun. Stretching it on your fingers works just fine. ping!

He needs to get a clue. You can be a nice guy AND a good dad, but right now, he’s only being the first choice.

You know, just because you know you are doing the right thing as a parent doesn’t mean it doesn’t kind of suck when the tiny person who is usually full of smiles and hugs treats you like the commandant of a POW camp. Doing the right thing doesn’t always feel good. If it were easy to be the bad guy to a tiny child, I’d frankly worry about that person. Wally did the right thing. He’s allowed to talk to another parent about the sucky part of it.

I’d take the silent treatment over the loud, obnoxious temper tantrums any day!!!

Max is lucky that taking his rubber band gun from him was his only punishment after being disobedient

Wait until you take the car away from him!

You distract a little kid with a bad toy with a better toy or activity. Alternately you could be the grown up and take decisive action and take the bad toy and move on without guilt.