So a couple of days ago Noah ripped a flap out of one of his lift the flap spot books. He looked up to see if we saw and then quickly opened the seat on his walker toy and put the ripped part in there in the hope we wouldn`t notice.
Is he already hitting the sneaky/naughty stage?
He also likes to look us in the eye and throw stuff off his highchair (food, drink bottle etc)- sometimes he waits til I go to pick up something he has dropped then throws something else overboard into my hair.
He is also obsessed with magnets so we put a couple low down on the fridge for him to play with- he carries them around the house “hiding” them everywhere- like in the bin, on the dishwasher, in the cupboard in the kitchen, in amongst his toys or in the seat of his walker.
I wonder if this sneaky behaviour is just the start………
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I am just a twenty something Aussie girl living in Chiba, Japan with my Japanese husband trying to make sense of the crazy Japanese world we live in! We welcomed our first son in December 2009 (Noah) and a second son in January 2011, 2 months premature (Shion). I am working hard at raising them to be confident, bilingual, happy kids!
He’ll be hiding girls in his room in a few years time! This is just the build-up
Oooohhh the looking you straight in the eye and then doing something really naughty stage really gets my goat! The good news is it should be over in about 5 years…. then you get defiance and potty mouth instead…. but at least they’re old enough to get time outs!
Umebossy- I have no doubt!!!
Heather- Isn`t he a little young though to be doing something so naughty and KNOWING it is naughty but doing it anyway. I thought it wouldn`t start for awhile but I guess I was naive.
5 years. EEK! 6.5 years for me since baby 2 will be less than 18 months behind Noah. Oh god.
I don’t think he’s actually doing stuff that he knows is naughty out of defiance at this stage, it is just that he knows he’ll get a reaction from you when he does that stuff so he’s sort of experimenting with cause and effect (Annika also loves to do the whole, “let’s throw this on the floor, wait for mom to pick it up and hand it to me, then throw it on the floor again” routine). Since Noah is just one he probably doesn’t have any serious consequences for “naughty” behavior I’m sure? So probably he’s still at that stage where any attention is good attention.
As for the “hiding” — that is just one “fun” part of having mobile children who don’t yet understand that things go in certain places. I hate toys with multiple parts or sets of smallish things, like puzzles, because my kids will scatter that stuff ALL over the house. Like why shouldn’t there be a bath toy in the clothes dresser anyhow? LOL. My son is 3 and is really just now starting to understand that things have particular places. Before he’d help me put stuff away for sure, but the moment I turned my back the stuff would be halfway across the room. So annoying!
I agree with Jessica, he’s just seeing how many times you’ll pick stuff up for him. What happens if I do this? Will mummy pick it up every time? There perhaps may come a time when he is deliberately getting you to pick up his stuff. Not long before he says “mummy do it!” all the time lol! Then you can start to teach him about picking up his own stuff and putting things away. They all go through phases where they are testing mummy and learning about boundaries. The naughty phase is when you tell them not to do something and they look you in the eye and go ahead and do it anyway! This phase can last for an eternity apparently.