Cosmic Kids Yoga website
I may have mentioned once or twice than The Boy, like many (most?) three year olds is a tiny bundle of seriously high-energy, wired over-tiredness, a ticking time bomb of half-understood emotion and high spirits just waiting for a thwarting of his will to completely lose.his.shit. Preschool have suggested some strategies, The Man and I have done our research and read up a few parenting books and tried all kinds of different ways to help him regulate his emotions and behaviour. Banning television has helped, to a point, and I thought mindfulness might be a useful skill for him to learn, but when I tried it we actually ended up with our biggest meltdown ever – turns out the difficulty of teaching your own children anything starts pretty early.
Jack-in-a-bed
So The Boy likes to hop out of bed repeatedly of an evening, as – I believe – many (most?) children do. In fact I do remember doing this myself on many occasions (apologies Mater, only now do I realise my sins) though it seemed entirely reasonable at the time.
The Man and I tried a few tactics for dealing with this, from Supernanny’s patented “Back to bed, darling” (the ‘darling’ usually uttered through tightly gritted teeth), to sitting in the room with him and a wonderful childrens’ meditation CD called Calm Kids, Bedtime Meditations For Kids. All of these were, ultimately successful, but only in conjunction with one, critical, crucial, vital element: that of complete and utter exhaustion.