Sunny At His Worst

As a treat, we took Sunny to a large indoor jungle gym he'd been asking to go to for a week. He saw a boy taking his socks off and asked me if he could take his socks off. I said, "definitely not, no way."

Five minutes later, I saw him running around in the gym with no socks on! "But I forgot," he said.

I made him stop playing, put his socks back on and leave immediately. He was pretty upset about this, of course, and went into a big fake cry, which my husband and I ignored. I can always tell a fake cry because he sort of looks out of the corner of his eyes as he's doing it.

I gave him a mini-lecture that he had just made a very bad choice and was just compounding it by fake crying. Not only did he ignore what I'd told him to do, he was endangering his poor feet! Sunny has a case of athlete's foot, and every morning and every night we clean his feet, put Lamisil cream on his toes and put them in clean socks. He's normally very good about putting up with this, even though the creme tickles him.

Sunny is usually good at following directions, but boy is he stubborn. You can't give an inch because he'll take a mile. We could tell that from the first day we met him. I have to be strict with him in a lot of ways.

I don't see him as manipulative, though. He doesn't manipulate for the sake of manipulation. He does it because he sees something he wants, then a switch flips in his brain, and he has to make sure all routes of getting what he wants are exhausted. It's amazing how imaginative and logical he can be at imagining these routes. He also has a great memory for all the possible precedents and exceptions that could apply to the case at hand.

I don't see any solution to this pattern of behavior. I think we're always going to have occasional clashes and storms. However, the other side of the coin is positive. He's confident. He knows what he wants. He's incredibly articulate when it comes to expressing this. Even though he's impulsive, he's open to reason and is always looking for reasons and asking about the reasons of things... and that's going to be a good foundation for developing critical thinking skills.

I think I'd have a much harder time raising a child who was more of an uncertain and indecisive type.