~~~Hooray2005

DaiLyght

I think what you said in your response is exactly what I'm looking to do. We do things right now like timeouts and a lot of talking, I try to make my praises a bigger deal than my negatives. It works, usually. However, DS is in the middle of being a 3 year old and what once was my happy baby, is now an attitude filled 3 year old. I've been feeling two things recently: 1) the things we're doing aren't enough. It may work for the right-now, but not changing anything long term. 2) he is picking up and feeding off of our frustration. I feel like I'm so upset and frustrated with him all the time and I don't want to feel that way anymore, and I don't want him to either.

I told my DH last night that I just wanted to explore other things that maybe were different than what we're doing now, to help find something that might work better for him - and us. Hence, my looking into these two books.

So with that, do you think that the SOS book sounds like what I'm looking for? Or is there something else I might want to look at first? 

Hooray2005

Hey - I'm heading out the door, so if you send another reply, I'll check for it when I get back

I really like the SOS book and used to recommend it to parents all the time (granted, that was before I was a parent and realized that simply handing the a book and encouraging them to be consistent was insufficient - lol!) It's definitely behaviorally-focused, and provides excellent examples and varying approaches to how to handle different behaviors.  I find it to be more like a parenting cookbook - if one recipe doesn't work, try another   It sounds like it might be a nice complement to what you're already trying.

They have a website sosprograms.com that will give you a peek into the format, aproach, etc.  Might be worth looking up in the library first, then deciding if it's something that matches your style.

 I'd say it's one downside is addressing the larger "emotional" piece of childrearing - it tries, but I've always finished reading it wanting a bit more. I've liked the Positive Discipline books for this purpose (less for direct application of techniques, but more for helping develop my approach to parenting).

HTH - and honestly, would love to chat more about about this (we're in the exact same boat at the moment with DS and all of the "techniques" I learned in school aren't working with him - aaggh!!)

Back in a bit