PLEASE Charlie Not the Brushing!
Ethan has always been his own person. So very different from his older brothers from the start.
We started doing baby sign language with him around his 1st birthday because he wasn't talking much at all and we needed to be able to communicate with him. We kind of let that go once he did start speaking. But he still doesn't converse with us. He sometimes still uses a little sign language but mostly speaks in phrases from movies and tv shows that he watches. Like, when we were at the Dr.'s office last week. He didn't say leave me alone, or stop touching me, or anything like that. He just screamed "NO" or he'd say to me "PLEASE Charlie, not the brushing." That's from the Charlie and Lola episode where Lola gets a haircut.
This sometimes gets difficult to know what he wants, especially when I don't know every detail of every movie that he watches. He often times gets frustrated with us and therefore does a lot of screaming. This is a challenge for me. My other boys didn't behave that way at all. My first reaction is to discipline him, fits aren't allowed. But that doesn't work at all, it only makes the situation worse. I was explaining this to our pediatrician. Within seconds he looked at me and said, "he's a visual learner." It was as if someone turned the switch to the "on" position in my brain. It made perfect sense to me and now I feel like I have a plan of attack when it comes to parenting Ethan. For starters, I'm getting out the baby sign language dvd again and we're going back to that. It was working really well before, I hope he is still interested in doing that now.
My next step is to do some research on other ways to handle him. so my question to you is this, do you have visual learners? If so, any tips or any great resourses that I could check out?
Sheryl Bane
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It sounds like you have a great plan. I'll see if I can find some ideas for you.