We’re running into some behavioral issues with the boy – it seems that all he wants to eat anymore are Cheeze-Its, Goldfish crackers, chicken nuggets, and pizza rolls. It came to a head today with him refusing to eat cereal or one of his sandwiches for breakfast and insisted on Goldfish crackers. It has gotten so frustrating I had to talk to my daughter about the situation today to see if we could come up with a solution. We did, and it is simple…
Let him go hungry.
It seems that all the foods we have provided are acceptable, but he likes the snacks better and since he is away from home, he is testing limits to see what he can get away with – but now we are on to him. Apparently even the breakfast cereal we got him isn’t one he wanted to try, but one of his favorites he eats all the time at home – his sudden dislike for it is just another attempt at trying a play for sympathy and get more snacks. His mother said that if he doesn’t eat his dinner to just set aside his plate and direct him back to it when he starts asking for snacks shortly after dinner – that is what happens when he is at home.
It also has been a challenge monitoring his screen time, because I didn’t want to impose any restrictions that kept him from talking to his sister. Well, that was a bit of a mistake because it turns out he only wants to “talk to his sister” to be able to play games with her, and as soon as that was off the table, he no longer had the desire to talk with her all day… or even for five minutes. His stepfather is re-enabling the screen time limits from the parental controls for all games and YouTube, so he will be cut off from all that after two hours, but still can talk to his family anytime for as long as he wants… just not while playing games.
He also seems to weaponize incompetence, so we’ve begun letting him think he has gotten away with something before calling him back to fix whatever the issue is. It took him ten minutes today to set a bowl properly in the bowl rack of our dishwasher. Was it frustrating for me to show him three times how to do it properly? Yes. Does he now know that we absolutely know, without a shadow of doubt, that he knows how to put a bowl in the dishwasher? Yes.
Frankly, he’s had a much more lenient experience here than at home (grandparent’s prerogative, right?) since he gets a later bedtime (I’d feel bad sending him to bed while it is still light out), more screen time (up until now at least), and relatively unrestricted access to food and snacks – but that is changing now. After his acting out yesterday and our arrival to the end of our rope, his screen time has a hard cut-off of two hours, he no longer gets unrestricted access to snacks, and will have to go to bed earlier (still not going to make it 8:30PM every day, but he will need to settle and read or watch something educational).
Anyhow, there’s some choring to do and I need to make sure he’s not being sneaky…
Song of the day: Hunger Strike by Temple of the Dog
Leave a Reply