Is there anything more embarrassing for a parent than having to apologize because your kid hit another kid???

I’m sure there probably is, but with our oldest now entering the terrible threes, I guess this is the stage that we’re at… 🙁

Today is the first day I’ve ever had to deal with something like this as a parent. I mean, we’ve been sporadically dealing with him hitting the dog or occasionally one of us, but it’s much worse when it’s somebody who doesn’t know him and just has a crying daughter for you to answer to.

I think I dealt with it the best I could at the time – he’d gotten two warnings earlier for being too rough and I was actually in the middle of pulling him out for pushing another kid when a Dad approached me and said that he’d shoved his two girls, too…

The guy was kind enough about it, really – he recognized that Christopher was young and I tried to get him to apologize, but he just doesn’t know that word yet. I apologized profusely to all three of them … one daughter was in tears … and after trying to talk to him about why what he did was wrong, I eventually put him back in his stroller and he whined for a while before falling asleep. 

I read later that for a lot of toddlers, this is just a phase that they go through – particularly out of frustration for not knowing how to express themselves. He had gone without his nap because we were at Disney – something that we’re going to have to work on, as lately he’s been very cranky if he misses his nap. 

Aside from that, I guess we need to just keep emphasizing right from wrong, and good touch/bad touch, and keep an eye on how he behaves with other children. Hopefully playing more at school will help to build his social skills, too. 

I hope so … because this is the first time I’ve ever felt disappointed in my son and make no mistake about it – I don’t like it.