"I Pinch"
Abbie’s latest ultra bad habit is pinching. She uses her whole hand to pinch, digging in with all five fingers in a gouging motion, possibly in order to maximize the possibility of drawing blood. This habit makes me long for the days when all she did was bite; biting hurts more, but at least her mouth has a far more limited range than her hands. Plus she only has one mouth. Not that she doesn’t bite anymore, but at least her biting is easily sidestepped.
I wish I knew what she was thinking. I know that pinching is usually her way of telling me something, specifically “pay attention to me,” but it can mean other things like “come look at this” or “I enjoy this pinching game.” The “I want attention” part I get, and I’m anxiously awaiting the day when she starts talking and can just say, “I want attention.” What I don’t get is the times she seems to pinch out of boredom or curiosity, where she’ll just walk up and start pinching for no obvious reason. Once I walked around the corner to find her pinching the top of Tory’s head in what couldn’t have been an attention-grabbing maneuver since I wasn’t even in the room. Fortunately she was pinching Tory who has an extra protective layer around his body to prevent harm.
I also don’t understand why she’ll even pinch after I explicitly tell her not to. She pinches, I state the obvious (“Don’t pinch, that hurts”), she pinches again (“You hurt daddy, stop pinching”), she immediately pinches again (“If you pinch one more time, you’re going to your room”), and she quickly pinches one more time (“Go to your room”). At that point she stops, looks at me hurt that I’d tell her to go to her room without warning, and offers some verbal protest ranging from squawking to outright bawling before I drag her into her room. After being locked in her room for a minute, well, a few minutes, I let her out and she usually behaves if for no other reason than she’s forgotten why she started pinching. The other day though, after imprisoning her for pinching, the first thing she did was walk up and pinch me again. I shut her back in her room, let her out after a couple more minutes, and she walked right back to me and pinched again.
I don’t know how best to react to pinching. Since she usually wants attention, my first instinct is to ignore her like any other tantrum, but that would send the signal that pinching is an acceptable way to express frustration, and I wouldn’t want her expressing her frustration all over her future kindergarten classmates. I do my best to ignore the occasional isolated pinch when it doesn’t hurt, but that may just be communicating that she needs to pinch really hard to grab attention. Or she could just pinch her brothers; that always grabs our attention.
As punishment, I send her to her room, though I try to warn her first so that theoretically she’ll learn that future actions have consequences. It gets her out of my hair and away from our skin for a minute, but that might be all it accomplishes since she has plenty of playthings in her room like books, stuffed animals, and the diaper pail. Plus I hate to associate her room with punishment. Ideally I’d like to put her on a timeout chair, but she doesn’t understand that punishment in any way and immediately hops back down a la Cartman.
Then there’s physical punishment. She spent most of our recent trip to the grocery store pinching me from her cart seat as my exposed hands pushed the handlebars.* As we neared the checkout lane, finally out of frustration** I slapped her hand. It worked as she stopped pinching for a minute, though I wasn’t sure if I looked like a worse parent because I have an out-of-control child who constantly pinches, or because I just hit my child.
She stopped pinching just long enough for the cashier to scan all of our items. As we pulled through to load our bagged groceries into the cart, Abbie pinched the cashier, who had obliviously turned her back on our little crab. I apologized, but the cashier said it was okay, that it just tickled a little. Hopefully that’s the last stranger who has to experience her pinching.
* The person who invents a set of handcuffs that attaches to the shopping cart seatbelt will make a fortune.
** Whenever the phrase “out of frustration” precedes an interaction with a child, you know that interaction is going to be something stupid.
I wish I knew what she was thinking. I know that pinching is usually her way of telling me something, specifically “pay attention to me,” but it can mean other things like “come look at this” or “I enjoy this pinching game.” The “I want attention” part I get, and I’m anxiously awaiting the day when she starts talking and can just say, “I want attention.” What I don’t get is the times she seems to pinch out of boredom or curiosity, where she’ll just walk up and start pinching for no obvious reason. Once I walked around the corner to find her pinching the top of Tory’s head in what couldn’t have been an attention-grabbing maneuver since I wasn’t even in the room. Fortunately she was pinching Tory who has an extra protective layer around his body to prevent harm.
I also don’t understand why she’ll even pinch after I explicitly tell her not to. She pinches, I state the obvious (“Don’t pinch, that hurts”), she pinches again (“You hurt daddy, stop pinching”), she immediately pinches again (“If you pinch one more time, you’re going to your room”), and she quickly pinches one more time (“Go to your room”). At that point she stops, looks at me hurt that I’d tell her to go to her room without warning, and offers some verbal protest ranging from squawking to outright bawling before I drag her into her room. After being locked in her room for a minute, well, a few minutes, I let her out and she usually behaves if for no other reason than she’s forgotten why she started pinching. The other day though, after imprisoning her for pinching, the first thing she did was walk up and pinch me again. I shut her back in her room, let her out after a couple more minutes, and she walked right back to me and pinched again.
I don’t know how best to react to pinching. Since she usually wants attention, my first instinct is to ignore her like any other tantrum, but that would send the signal that pinching is an acceptable way to express frustration, and I wouldn’t want her expressing her frustration all over her future kindergarten classmates. I do my best to ignore the occasional isolated pinch when it doesn’t hurt, but that may just be communicating that she needs to pinch really hard to grab attention. Or she could just pinch her brothers; that always grabs our attention.
As punishment, I send her to her room, though I try to warn her first so that theoretically she’ll learn that future actions have consequences. It gets her out of my hair and away from our skin for a minute, but that might be all it accomplishes since she has plenty of playthings in her room like books, stuffed animals, and the diaper pail. Plus I hate to associate her room with punishment. Ideally I’d like to put her on a timeout chair, but she doesn’t understand that punishment in any way and immediately hops back down a la Cartman.
Then there’s physical punishment. She spent most of our recent trip to the grocery store pinching me from her cart seat as my exposed hands pushed the handlebars.* As we neared the checkout lane, finally out of frustration** I slapped her hand. It worked as she stopped pinching for a minute, though I wasn’t sure if I looked like a worse parent because I have an out-of-control child who constantly pinches, or because I just hit my child.
She stopped pinching just long enough for the cashier to scan all of our items. As we pulled through to load our bagged groceries into the cart, Abbie pinched the cashier, who had obliviously turned her back on our little crab. I apologized, but the cashier said it was okay, that it just tickled a little. Hopefully that’s the last stranger who has to experience her pinching.
* The person who invents a set of handcuffs that attaches to the shopping cart seatbelt will make a fortune.
** Whenever the phrase “out of frustration” precedes an interaction with a child, you know that interaction is going to be something stupid.
posted by Matt at
10:13 PM
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