by Janet Dendy

Created on: November 06, 2010

Dealing with difficult children is always a challenge. There have been so many times that I have looked at my beautiful blue eyed angel daughter and wondered when her head was going to spin around and exorcist style pea green stuff come spewing out of her mouth.  Now I am by no means an expert on disciplining children. I do however have some experience with a very, "strong willed" child (for lack of a better phrase). My daughter is stubborn and, smart and beautiful, and demanding, and thinks the world is coming to an end if she doesn't get her way. Some of this is admittedly my fault. I didn't listen to all those people who knew what they were talking about when they told me I was spoiling her. OK, well, now whats done is done, how do I get control of her. I tried so many things. I tried time out chair. I tried grounding her. I tried putting her to bed earlier. I tried taking things away. Nothing seemed to work. Ah, but then inspiration. I found a program that I learned through a video. Called

1..2...3...  Magic. I know, I know, very hokey sounding. Let me tell you though. It works. 

My child was completely out of control. She screamed, she threw tantrums, she kicked the walls, she cursed at me, she even hit and kicked me a few times. I will admit to many times, screaming back at her, threatening her with extremely DIRE consequences, reasoning with her, even begging her. I was reduced to tears more times than I can tell you. I was reading about this program online and thought well, this will never work. It did. Surprisingly well. I also have since adapted my discipline to fit my schedule and adjust consequences to fit the punishment. How this works, is no arguing, no screaming, no discussion. When they are doing behavior you want them to stop, you count. 1.......2......allowing about 5 secs between numbers. When you get to three you say, " That's three, take 5" This you adapt to your kids age. Mine is 7 so she gets 7. You add time for violence, or swearing. All you say is " That's three take 7 and add 5 for potty mouth." Violence you don't count. You just say, " That's three take 5 plus 10 for hitting". That's all. That simple. You do it every time no matter what. After about two weeks my daughter started to calm down. It really was like magic. She did wreck her room a few times when she was in there. She even chopped off some hair in the front to teach me a lesson. I made no comment at all. I didn't clean her room. Eventually she got tired of

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