When Experts Disagree

My three year old is certifiable. He is the most laid back of my three boys and is now driving me absolutely crazy. The ever controversial Dr. Sears suggests that three year old are a mother's dream come true. He seems to think that your average three year old likes to obey, remembers the rules and less egocentric than 18 month olds. Technically speaking, I suppose that last one is true. Theo is certainly more aware of others as specifically distinct from himself. I'm sure there is an upside to his new found sense of the specificity of Theo.

Theo's new found self has given him a stronger desire to be independent. In general, this is a good thing. He potty trained quite easily. He uses his own spoon - my kids have slow fine motor stuff, so it took them all til age three to master this. It is a great relief when serving oatmeal! He also will play for even longer stretches on his own, but this was never really an area that needed improvement. At age 2 he would disappear in his room, close the door and play drums. He is a bit chattier. He has lots of thoughts and feelings on all manner of topics.

He most enjoys expressing his very strong dissent. He enjoys expressing it loudly. "No! I yelled at you, Mommy, I did!" and other charming phrases. At his three year check-up, the pediatrician praised his excellent sentence structure when Theo shouted, "No, no, doctor, don't check my ears!"

Theo is my third three year old boy. I am, you could say, a bit of an expert on the topic. I do not find at all that his superior intellect and memory have made him more compliant. If anything, less so. He is the baby of our family and has 4 bigger people around him. Now he knows where all the buttons are and likes to push them. So, I do see that he has learned more about cause and effect relationships. When he was two, this played out as an obsession with light switches and drums. Now, he mostly uses Henry, but he likes to play the rest of the family as well.

I feel badly for Theo - when he isn't knocking over some carefully built structure of his older brothers - because he is so clearly trying to organize his brain. He spends much of the day chatting about opposites or things that "match the same, mommy! it matches the same!" When faced with an M, he enjoys flipping it over to the hidden W. Then he repeats it with the 9 and the 6.

He came downstairs with Isaac last week. Isaac was unable to convince him that our home would not be set fire to by bad firemen. I talked about it a little with him and he decided "that the bad firemen will put fire on our house and the good firemen will take it out." This makes sense in a crazy three year old sort of logic. Every time Theo sees a picture of firemen, there is a house in flames. He is own his way to being a criminologist, those "first on scene" are most likely to be the perpetrators of the crime. In the end, I had to let him believe it. Nothing else could make sense of those little fire mice in Richard Scarry books all the time. Two days later he got a small injury, a skinned knee, I think. He sat on my lap talking it out and informed me "The bad hospital gives me a boo-boo and the good hospital makes me better." All these opposite and opposing forces, you'd think he understood the world of Star Wars and The Force. And someday, he will.
Right now I see him as slightly neurotic and intensely rigid as he deals with the uniqueness of a small Theo in a very big world of fire mice, ambulances and all the fears which have always accompanied age three in my household. He does have superior intellect and memory over himself at age 2. His eyes are wide open to the world around him - to all of it, its joys and treasures, but also to its emergencies and griefs. There may be no monsters under the bed, but he knows there are things to be worried about. He knocks over block tours, screams at his mother and lands himself in time outs, but all in some crazy, counter productive frenzy in which he struggles to exert control in his very small sphere of influence.

Age three, 9 more months to go. In my expert opinion, it will get a little better at 3.5, when he goes to school. Then we will hang on tight for four as the winter passes.