That's so wild that a later edition turned it into basically a totally different book! Sounds like a better one, so that's good, but still very strange.
E's problem, especially at that age, was not battles of will between me and her! E's problem was battles of will between herself and herself -- she would get upset when she was not able to do things the way she felt she should, which spanned basically all activities, including quite a few that were things she loved to do, not things I was asking her to do at all
This made me wince sympathetically XD I mean, I had actual battles of will with O, too (while he was unquestionably our "easy" child, he is also the stubbornest person in the family after me, and some battles he picked as a toddler were just plain non-negotiable, like running across the street), but he is also prone to this mode of holding himself to some self-imposed standard on leisure activities and getting upset (though glumly, not explosively for the most part) if he wasn't "good enough" at, like, drawing stick figures. (We were always very careful to emphasize effort rather than results, for the twin reasons that B was a terrible slacker at school stuff until he got to sufficiently advanced math (trigonometry and calculus) that held his attention, and I had Soviet school trauma that didn't care about effort/enjoyment/learning at all, just results, and was determined to avoid that for them, so we tried very hard to associate effort/process with the positive thing -- but O didn't believe anything positive we said, and would just crumple up his drawings and stuff like that.)
And L, we would joke that her battles of will weren't against us, they were against the universe -- things like gravity and the passage of time and things like that. Fortunately she got into fiddly hobbies like jewelry-making and crochet only later, when she already knew how to control her outbursts better. But there were definitely still a lot of explosions directed at the universe (with anyone nearby getting caught in the blast) when she was first picking those up. :P
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Date: 2023-02-10 04:03 pm (UTC)E's problem, especially at that age, was not battles of will between me and her! E's problem was battles of will between herself and herself -- she would get upset when she was not able to do things the way she felt she should, which spanned basically all activities, including quite a few that were things she loved to do, not things I was asking her to do at all
This made me wince sympathetically XD I mean, I had actual battles of will with O, too (while he was unquestionably our "easy" child, he is also the stubbornest person in the family after me, and some battles he picked as a toddler were just plain non-negotiable, like running across the street), but he is also prone to this mode of holding himself to some self-imposed standard on leisure activities and getting upset (though glumly, not explosively for the most part) if he wasn't "good enough" at, like, drawing stick figures. (We were always very careful to emphasize effort rather than results, for the twin reasons that B was a terrible slacker at school stuff until he got to sufficiently advanced math (trigonometry and calculus) that held his attention, and I had Soviet school trauma that didn't care about effort/enjoyment/learning at all, just results, and was determined to avoid that for them, so we tried very hard to associate effort/process with the positive thing -- but O didn't believe anything positive we said, and would just crumple up his drawings and stuff like that.)
And L, we would joke that her battles of will weren't against us, they were against the universe -- things like gravity and the passage of time and things like that. Fortunately she got into fiddly hobbies like jewelry-making and crochet only later, when she already knew how to control her outbursts better. But there were definitely still a lot of explosions directed at the universe (with anyone nearby getting caught in the blast) when she was first picking those up. :P