Parenting a 4-year-old

I have a four-year-old. My daughter, A’Lia,  brings out so many different emotions in me daily. Sometimes I feel like running into a wall or screaming to the top of my lungs. Then, there are moments where she is the cutest kid on the planet, and I can’t do anything but love her and want to hug her and give her all the kisses. She keeps me active.

Because her siblings are older than her, she believes she can do what the big kids do. Now keep in mind, I have five other children totaling six kids. Their ages are 22, 20, 17, 12, and 11. A’Lia, the four-year-old, loves to imitate what her 11-year-old brother does. If he’s using the desktop, she feels like she should use the desktop too. 

Not only that, she wants to use it at the same time that he decides to use it. If he does not remove himself from the computer chair, she gets upset, stomps, and proceeds to push him out of the computer chair. He pretends to fall out of the chair and walks away. If he is sitting in the living room watching a movie, she picks up the remote and switches to another film that she prefers to watch. The sad thing about this is once she does it, she’s only sitting down for five minutes before she’s up again, finding somebody else to torture.

Again, she is too cute, so we get stuck on the cuteness. Then when she turns into She-Hulk, we run and hide. We can depend on her to blow her top at least once a day. When she does, I try to redirect her to help quash this type of behavior. I believe I have tried everything my “mommy and me” forums have advised me to do. From time out to full-on no sweets for a week punishment, she is immune to all of that. But I’m working on it😊.