So Sensitive

I am not sure why, but it seems Mr. T has come down with a serious case of the sensitives. Where did this come from? I'm not sure if he is just tired from not taking naps, or it is just some emotional issue he is going through that we don't know about. It could be the naps thing, since he really doesn't like to take naps at all. We have basically given up trying to get him to take them at home since all methods we could come up with have failed. Positive reinforcement, bribery, rational conversations about how good he feels after he takes a nap, force, yelling, threats of taking away toys all have been tried and have failed. I am not sure how well he naps at school either. So he may just get grumpy and sensitive in the afternoons. 

Here is what I am talking about. Last night he was playing his Game boy with a different game in it than usual. It is Yoshi island or something like that. One of the parts of the game has a section where there are little plants and things that try to catch you as you apparently carry Luigi on your back. If they 'get you' Luigi ends up in some kind of bubble and starts to float away. You then have to jump up and hit the bubble and Luigi will then fall safely back onto your back. T is watching me go over it and Luigi went up in the bubble and the character starts to scream something unrecognizable. T hears this and is so concerned for Luigi that he starts crying. "Don't let him float away. I don't want him to float away. He is crying!" He was he so sad. We put the game away so he didn't have to play that. This is the same boy who has a great time crashing his Thomas the Tank Engine into anything he can find on the floor, including someof Thomas's other friends without a second thought. Also the same boy who grabs Elmo by the feet and bounces his head off the floor to hear his eyes bounce off the linoleum.

It is not just the game though. It can be just about anything that makes him cry lately. Asking him not to do something often makes him cry. I'm not talking about yelling at him, I mean just literally asking him not to touch something, or not to jump or run can make him cry lately. Normally it would just get a "Why not?" or maybe an "OK daddy, I won't touch that." Now it ends up with pouting, crying, and even yelling something at us like,"I'm not talking to you any more!", followed by storming out to his bedroom to pout and yell at us from there. 

The other day he got a nice haircut from his mom. He went through part of it fine, then after getting half of it cut he started to cry and fight her about cutting the rest. He was so scared that it might hurt he didn't want to do it any more. Not because it did hurt, but because he thought it might hurt. He already had half of it cut and that didn't hurt. Why would the other half hurt. The next day I saw a few hairs that were long in the front, so I grabbed a scissors to just clip them quickly. There was crying involved. He wouldn't let me do it and said it hurt. How could it hurt when I hadn't even gotten the scissors within a foot of him yet. I made the quick 1 second clip and the whole thing was over. He was then happy and off to find the next toy to play with.

So, I am just being patient, and giving him extra hugs to calm him down and make him feel happy again. Then when he is calm we discuss why we told him not to run, or jump, or do what ever set him off. He agrees with us and then we go and play something together or watch some TV together. Will this phase pass? Is there a different way to handle this? I imagine a father in the old west handling it by slapping the kid across the head and saying," Now that hurts, so when the hair cut feels like that, let me know." Not being Clint Eastwood, I'm going to have to look for more modern methodology in child rearing.