Phased

It seems my sweet daughter is going through what I'm going to call a little phase. I'm hoping it's a little phase, and not the phase otherwise known as 2.5 to 3, because six months is a long time, and we're not even officially at the two-and-a-half point yet.

Before now I'd been fairly confident that Mabel was probably not beating up the other kids, unless she was talking them into submission with a detailed monologue. But lately, just to ensure an end to my smugness, she's turned a tad, well, violent. With the hitting and the scratching and the biting, oh my. Poor Monkey is most often the recipient, since he's usually logistically and emotionally closest, and he has that special brotherly trick of provoking her. But then, instead of retreating out of range, he stays where she is and just shouts, "Mummy, Mabel's hitting me." Sometimes this is interspersed with "Hit me again," and "See if you can get me now."

So I'm trying not to make too big a deal of it. If he's idiot enough to (a) poke a known tiger and (b) stay there waiting for more, I think he can deal with the consequences. He's big enough and ugly enough to run away on his own initiative, I think.

On the other hand, of course, Mabel can't be let away with such behaviour. We look her in the eye and tell her in serious tones, "We don't hit, Mabel" - and she faithfully, sweetly, and insincerely promises not to do it any more.

She's not a two-year-old lashing out in frustration or anger because she lacks the words. Mabel has the words to explain pretty much anything she cares to. (Though I do remind myself not to expect too much. She may talk like a three-year-old, but she's still very much two in every other way.) When I (idiotically) ask her why she's doing it, she tells me things like "I want to be bad," or "I'm going to hit him," or "I just want to." I think the last one is key: she can, and she's finding out what happens when she does.

No longer content to do what she's told just because we say she should (as if that was ever a trait of hers), she has made a new leap of autonomy and understood that she has the power to make people happy or sad, angry or loving. She cuddles up to us one minute, plainly manipulative, declaring adorably, "I wuv you", and then dances off with the prospect of mischief lighting up her face. She sits in her carseat and tells me, "I'm happy now. I'm happy because you let me take my toys with me." In stark contrast to before her nap, when she screamed because I had to strap her in.

Her hit is a closed-fisted arm flail: not a deliberate from-the-elbow punch, but not an open-handed slap either. It must come straight from impatient instinct, because it's not a move she's seen anyone else execute.  When Monkey was rougly this age, he went through a throwing phase; instead of hitting out with his hands (teeth, feet, nails), he used whatever object was to hand to express his displeasure. We removed the offending objects and told him not to, and in a while (too long a while, I'm sure, while it was ongoing) he stopped. We can't exactly remove Mabel's fists from her arms, so we just have to remove her from the object of her disaffection; but I do hope that soon enough I'm reminiscing about how this too was just a phase.