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Mine! -overly possessive three-year-olds
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When my son was three, he finally began to talk in full sentences. It was a very exciting time for us, as he previously mostly made his needs known by grunting and screaming. He now said things like “I want that”, “It’s mine”, and “Give me that, I want to have it.” He even learned to speak of himself in the third person: “It doesn’t belong to you, it’s Mendel’s!”
That’s right, he has mastered the possessive, and things have only gotten worse over the past year. Language is a handy thing, he finds. It helps him remind the rest of us that nothing in the house belongs to anyone but him. The fridge? It’s his. The dining room table, the stove, the dirty laundry, and even the cat: “Mine”. My purse, our clothes, and the car: they’re all really his. And he managed to become the very wealthy owner of all this without owning a credit card or checking account; it’s a sheer miracle. We do draw the line at steak knives and over-the-counter medication, though.
However funny this seemed at first, when we find a three year old, sitting on the couch, clenching a day-planner (mine) and a cell phone (my husband’s) close to his body, refusing to let go, it becomes annoying. We decide to do something about it through time-outs and other equally useless interventions. My daughter has her own methods: she randomly takes things away from him, including toys that really are his, to teach him that material things are, at best, fleeting. This leads to much screaming, pulling, pushing, and throwing the toy in question, which in turn lead to more time-outs. There are time-outs for him, time-outs for her, time-outs for everybody, including mommy. It’s obvious: we need a different strategy.
I channel Mandy Patinkin, grab my son’s blanket and favorite stuffed animal, and yell “Mine!” in order to show him that two can play this game. It doesn’t go over well.
Sensing that we are willing to do something about his possessiveness, my son ups the ante and readies himself for battle. Language apparently no longer serving his purpose, he adds physical aggression to the mix. While he is a virtual angel at his pre-school, at home he turns into the Terminator. He bites, claws, kicks and hits to his heart’s content when things don’t go his way. Sometimes he seems to do it just for fun, or to pay us back for some imaginary insult that hasn’t happened yet. And the worst part of it is, it hurts! Last week he head-butted me so hard, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I cried a little.
I read the Gesell Institute’s “Your Three-Year-Old” in a vain attempt to find some guidance. Do other kids his age act like this? Is it a stage? Will it go away? And the most important question of all: how soon? Although I normally like these books, this time I find zero answers. The book claims that children are much less aggressive at three then they were at two-and-a-half, so either the book lies, or we have an abnormal child. But wait: It says something about a relationship between aggression and humor. What? The bloody lip, the bruise on my arm, the bite marks, they’re really jokes? Oh, well then. That explains the maniacal laughter he displays when I say “Ouch! You’re hurting mommy!”
I guess we’ll just wait it out. Maybe in the meantime we’ll purchase some helmets, just to be safe. And we’ll always have our secret weapon: sarcasm, which we use as often as possible. We set such a good example that our daughter starts addressing her little brother as “Your Highness”. Whichever traumatizing effect that particular nickname might have on his development, we will have to wait and see.
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