Parent Q&A: When Four Year Olds Get Feisty
Dear Rebekka,
I am at my wits’ end. Until recently, my four year old was easy going, cooperative, and kind. Since the last few months she has been having huge tantrums when things don't go her way, she is hitting, using unkind words and harsh tones with us and her grandparents.
She has also started telling my dad, her grandfather, that he cannot sit on the couch with us or come in the car when we go somewhere. She has started being difficult (sometimes plain mean) with friends from the neighborhood as well, which is honestly mortifying.
I am pretty sure, based on things I have witnessed, that she is learning this at school (because honestly no one in our house speaks or behaves this way and we have always been very respectful with her even when disciplining) and I am beyond upset that despite all our best efforts to raise a respectful, kind child, she is now being influenced into becoming this child we don't recognize (and frankly don't even like very much sometimes).
We don't have a ton of choices when it comes to preschools/daycare in our immediate area, but we are getting to the point where we are thinking that it might be worth a drive to to get her to another school, away form these influences, and for us to gain some sanity again.
We just want our nice kid back. Help!
Flabbergasted by My Four Year Old
Hey friend!
First of all, can I tell you how much I hear you? My younger daughter is turning 5 soon, and age 4 has been super intense for her, so I know what you’re going through. In spite of how hard things sound, it’s great that you’re modeling respectful ways of relating in your home - that’s exactly the kind of discipline I support in raising resilient, emotionally flexible children. However, even the most respectful of parents will experience this kind of feisty behavior from older preschoolers! However, unless the school has a particularly tricky or intense group of kids (and you can definitely inquire about that), it’s unlikely that she’s picking up bad or antisocial habits from her peers.
You see, these “big little kids” are caught in a powerful and turbulent stage of their normal development. On the one hand, they want to have power, control, and autonomy - most kids start experimenting with this around 18-24 months (remember when they discovered they could throw food from the high chair?). This means that they’re going to be experimenting with powerful, controlling behaviors (like telling people what to do and letting their big feelings fly freely with unkind words).
On the other hand, they are aware that they are still small and vulnerable, relying on you for just about everything important they could need. In alignment with this awareness, around the age of 2 years, toddlers begin to form an acute fear of losing their parents’ love, met by a fierce determination to do anything they can to preserve that love. As early childhood mental health juggernaut Alicia Lieberman notes in The Emotional Life of the Toddler, this motivation is:
a powerful aid in helping the child to develop social awareness and, eventually, a moral conscience. The child’s love for the parent is so strong (even when not so visible) that it causes him to change his behavior: to refrain from hitting and biting, to share toys with a peer, to become toilet trained. This wish for approval is the parent’s most reliable ally in the process of socializing the child. Appealing to it is far more effective and much more emotionally healthy than threats of punishment.
This is good news! It means you can leverage your parental position to help your child express their need for power, control, and autonomy in ways that do not hurt people’s bodies or feelings. This is a matter of remembering the two arms of parenting by repeatedly holding the feelings (“It sounds like you don’t want grandpa to sit on the couch with us”) and holding the line (“That’s not a choice for you - grandpa can decide where his body goes and he’s welcome on the couch. You can decide who sits where if you want!”). It’s also important for kids to have regular, intentional opportunities to feel their power and strength in play. Role reversal games (where kids play at being parents, teachers, or heroes and parents are the kids, students, or villains) are a fun way of achieving this goal!
Morally speaking, during these years, children are beginning to cultivate an early sense of right and wrong, in large part driven by the paramount need to preserve their parents’ love. In fact, I’ll often tell parents that when children begin to lie around this age (and quite unconvincingly, as they often do!), it’s actually a sign of moral development, not a sign of budding immorality. Prior to that age, kids will have no problem gleefully declaring that they ate the cookies you were saving for later. But after a few years, young children have a conundrum - they really want to eat the cookies, but they also want to avoid their parents’ displeasure. So they strike a compromise - a lie!
You will see kids playing out this black/white struggle between the forces of good and evil most commonly in good guy/bad guy play (yes, with play aggression and even weapons). Kids must engage in this kind of “safe scary” play in order to resolve this crude early stage of moral development, moving past it into a more nuanced, “living in the gray” view of the complexity and nuance of human behavior. But first, children must both portray and malign the “bad guys” in their play. In Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays, celebrated preschool/kindergarten educator and author Vivian Gussin Paley describes this unfolding drama:
Bad guys are not allowed to have birthdays, pick blueberries, or disturb the baby. So say the four-year-olds who announce life's risks and dangers as they play out the school year. Their play is filled with warnings. They invent chaos in order to show that everything is under control. They portray fear to prove that it can be conquered. No theme is too large or too small for their intense scrutiny. Fantasy play is their ever dependable pathway to knowledge and certainty.
In a chapter titled “Franklin in the Blocks” from Paley’s A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, she describes a kindergartener who struggles to navigate this delicate seesaw of good and bad, completely dominating the blocks corner and shutting it down for communal play within 10 minutes of his arrival. Her assistant urges her:
to bring back the time-out chair, a punishment I had eliminated several years earlier. I had realized then that nothing good was accomplished by a time-out chair or any other means of removal and retribution. The Taiwan school director mentioned earlier had said it best: “I saw that, although the body was restricted, the child’s mind entered many fantasies and behavior was not improved.” Recall that when I asked her what did work, she added, “Patience first and then stories of good things happening. Not bad things.”
So she assembles the children on the rug and begins to tell a familiar story:
“Once there was a boy who had a big problem in the blocks. Pretend I’m that boy.” After asking [two other children] to bring a few blocks to the center of the rug, I began to wave my arms and shout. “No, not that way! Not there, over here! That’s not right! Watch me, give it here!” My behavior startled the two boys and everyone else but I kept it up a few moments longer. Suddenly there came a roar of approval from Franklin. “That’s me! You’re pretending me, right?” He was laughing and pounding his knees. “Mrs. Paley’s bein’ me! Watch her the way she goes.”
“You are absolutely correct, Franklin,” I said. “I was pretending to be you. Okay, now I’m changing the story and I want you to be the boy. Once there was a boy who knew how to play in the blocks. He always let people build their own way. Everyone called him Good Player. Franklin, you pretend to be Good Player, will you?” He bounded around the rug. “Hey, Teddy, put those blocks anyhow you want! I’ll help you. How high you need this to go? I’ll go get you some more, okay?”
The children squealed in delight. They realized Franklin was pretending, but my approach to the problem made sense to everyone. Did Franklin have a complete transformation? No miracles took place. However, when the old behaviors surfaced, we now had a useful story to bring up. “Hey, Franklin, you’re pretending the wrong boy, remember?” He might begin to argue, then look around at the hopeful faces and laugh. Had he figured out that changing to Good Player was not too different than giving up Darth Vader to become Luke Skywalker on the playground?
The power of storytelling is evident in Paley’s approach. You could use something similar in helping your daughter think about what kind of “player” she’s being with her friends and family!
Hopefully you’re still with me for two last points:
Nobody can be nice and good all the time - not even grown ups.
As Alicia Lieberman recounts, when an older toddler was asked by his concerned mother if he was happy, he answered:
“I am happy and sad and angry and bitey and clingy.” He refused to be seduced into acknowledging only his happy side.
We can love our children even when they are not nice. We can also help them find their way through the feelings and developmental imperatives that are making it hard for them to be cooperative and kind - each time we do so, we are training their young minds and helping them grow into relationally-minded, flexible people.
It’s also important to remember that:
Good and bad aren’t always so black and white - most things are shades of gray.
Notice even in your own story the impulse to identify your own family as “good” and the children at school as being “bad” influences! Hopefully, as what I’ve shared will show you, learning how to find—and live in—the gray requires time, patience, compassion, and empathy. It also helps to have developmentally appropriate expectations of young children.
It’s hard to learn how to play, socialize, cooperate, compromise, and navigate conflict. By muddling through preschool kids’ feistiness, we help them to become better humans (and perhaps ourselves, too, in the process).
I hope this helps - hang in there, you got this!
Rebekka
Rebekka Helford is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice in Los Angeles, California. With over a decade of experience working with parents and young children, Rebekka specializes in short-term intensive parenting consultation, using a variety of tools including home, office, and school visits to help families navigate developmental hiccups and get back on track. Virtual visits now available!
Click here to schedule an appointment or contact Rebekka with a question – who knows, she might even answer it in her next post!