battling with your four year old

First off, you’re not alone. Congrats on being a parent who is frustrated with their child of any age. Frustration is a normal feeling that goes hand in glove with joyful exuberance. The one can’t exist without the other. I’ve written about discipline lots before: Taming Your Tantruming Toddler, Helping Emotional Little Boy, Why Fear & Force Don’t Work, Bad Habits, Big Boy Battles: Loving Discipline, and more under the “parenting” tab. We are frustrated when things aren’t going as well as when we are joyfully exuberant about how wonderful our kid is. The baby is so cute. THE BABY IS CRYING NONSTOP. It all switches so quickly. First time parents are dismayed and rather shocked at how much time it takes to figure out how to really truly meet your baby’s needs. How to answer his or her cries for help, a diaper, a deep burp, a hunger, a rough adjustment to life outside the womb. I was. I had no clue about why my baby was crying. Sure, I’d read the books. I’d talked to everyone. But my baby. My baby. What were his needs? What were his little desires? What could I do for him that would assuage his inane relentless crying? Now some babies have acid reflux, and some babies are “colicky.” Mine had/was neither. He just wanted to be held almost all the time, upright, and he seemed to always hide his burps. And he seemed to know when I sat down. It was a hard learning…