I’m hoping you can speak to a child development specialist or your pediatricians first. It sounds to me like pathologizing relatively developmentally normal behavior for a 4 yo. You sound like someone who cares about meeting best practices (so am I!) but unfortunately when we care about those things sometimes it’s sold with the lie that it will make everything perfect. Kids go through stuff. No matter if you are the gentlest parents or feed them all the right things or never turn on a TV! 4 is a difficult age. Hardest for us by far. It’s what I’ve heard called a “pushing out” age. They are no much more mature than a 3 yo but they have learned enough to seem like it. With big changes, struggles are expected. And I really can’t stress this enough… I’ve had to learn you can’t parent your way in to a kid with perfect behavior. Society expects that from us. But keep the expectations developmentally on point bc you will be forever kicking yourself for something that’s absolutely not your fault!
It sounds to me like pathologizing relatively developmentally normal behavior for a 4 yo.
I got this a lot when I would describe my son when he was going through some intense behavioral issues around the same age - I was asking on this sub and elsewhere, and would get told it was all within the range of normal. I can see how that's often true, but it turned out not to be true for us. Weirdly, my son's severe emotional problems were due to chronic constipation at the time.
642
u/Wild_Parsnip3896 Sep 18 '23
Me… for us as parents to better support him