The Littlest Rebel

All the parenting books say at Clara's age you should distract from undesirable behavior. This is pretty ridiculous for her as she has refused to distract from six months old and maybe earlier. She is a very focused girl and, when she decides she wants to do something, it's what she wants. Period. She doesn't want to stop working on her goals to play your stupid game or whatever you are trying to distract her with. Even if she temporarily takes the bait, like if you offer a really good snack or something, as soon as she is done, she goes right back to what she was doing. It's really not effective for her. Right now we are storing our children's chairs in the basement behind a gate because every time she has access to them, this is what she does. She knows three things: 1) Joshua uses his hands to unlock the doors sometimes 2) Outside is the most gloriously wonderful place in the entire world 3) To go outside you need the door to be unlocked. So being a realist, she understands she can't unlock the door because she's too short. So her solution is to bring the chair to the door to unlock it. This is a good idea. Unfortunately, kids aren't allowed to open doors without permission in our house and also are not allowed to stand on chairs when they are not on the carpet so it's not working out as she hoped and the chairs are almost always not available to her at this point.