The parenting journey: Your three-year-old angel

The golden age!

After the rebellion of age two, your youngster is now at peace with himself and the world. He’ll take pleasure in being cooperative and win your approval, whereas in first adolescence, it often seems as if a child’s sole pleasure in life consists of being uncooperative.

Fulfilling biological needs:

 Your child has an innate biological drive to release his immense energy: run, jump, climb, move… So don’t expect him to always sit still: provide him with plenty of play space and play equipment, to develop basic foundation of muscular coordination and intellectual skills. 

Learning to express feelings: 

From three to six years old, allow your child to freely express his positive and negative feelings. It is bad for his personality development, his spontaneity, and his authenticity as a little person, to repress his emotions in these early years. After six years old, you can teach him then when certain feelings may safely be expressed, and when it is not wise to express them.

Controlling his impulses:

Up to this point, your child couldn’t fully control his impulses and prevent himself from disobeying your commands. But now, he will be developing the ability to inhibit himself from hitting, stealing, or other antisocial behavior.

It will take time and a number of repetitions before your child can establish an effective control system over his impulses, so don’t pressure him and try to make gradually increasing demands on his discipline.

A good age for kindergarten:

Your three-year-old has now a strong need for companionship. Kindergarten is a great place for him to learn socializing skills: how to share, to wait his turn, to ask for something, to express himself, to stand up for his rights, to participate as well as observe, to develop self-confidence with other children… These skills in human relations must be learned in early childhood for them to be effective in later age.

Gender identity: Male or Female  

Your child needs to achieve a firm gender identity; being aware of his sex is a very basic part of his self-concept and his mental health.

• Teach him about his sex organ in a relaxed and casual way; explain openly the specific traits of your child’s gender, and that would include terms like ‘uterus’ and ‘testicles’.
• Avoid gender stereotypes such as “being masculine means being tough and unfeeling,” “boys don’t cry,” “girls should not act that way”… you want your boy to grow up to be a man who are capable of showing tenderness, and sensitivity to the feelings of others. And you want your girl to grow up to be a woman who is less conforming, and more original and daring.
•  Don’t be rigid about gender roles; if a three-year-old boy wants to play house with dolls or wants to cook, let him be. And if a girl wants to play with trucks and swords, provide them for her; it’s not going to hurt.

Sex education

To avoid sexual deviation, treat the subject of sex as neutrally as you would any other subject. Children are not abnormally concerned with sex nor obsessed with it, it is the grown-ups awkward reaction to their naive questions that lead them to become so. 

Answer his questions as openly and honestly as you possibly can; give short and simple answers, and provide further explanation if your child asks for details.

• “Where babies come from?” “They come from inside the mother; they grow in a bag-like called the uterus.” You can even show him pictures of the fetus development.
• “How the baby comes out?” You can ask him to guess first before giving him the right answer “Mother has a special place down there like a tunnel, it stretches big enough to let the baby out and then it goes back to normal…”

Note: The boy might feel pleasure playing with his penis, this type of sexual pleasure is part of normal development in the preschool stage. You can leave him alone until he stops and move on to another activity, or you can distract him. At any rate, be cool and don’t get frightened over it, he is just satisfying his curiosity and will soon move on to something else.

Family romance

Around the age of three, children develop a new kind of feelings towards the parent of the opposite sex; the boy will fall deeply in love with his mother; he'll ask her for marriage, and will jealously perceive the father as a rival. One little boy expressed to his mother: “Gee Mom, I wish you were younger and a lot shorter and not married to Dad!” The same for girls; they develop deep romantic feelings towards their fathers and resent the mother.

This “Romance” is a very vital part of your child’s emotional development, and it will usually take the years from three to six for the little boy and girl to give up their romantic feelings and adjust to the reality that mother is father’s woman and vice versa.

How to deal with this phase?

If the parents have a basically stable and loving relationship, your child will gradually outgrow his impossible romantic fantasies. However, if your marriage is a hostile one, it will make it difficult for your child to adequately resolve this phase.

• Parents must be on the alert during this time, the child might take advantage of the weak spot in your marriage and will attempt, in his childish way, to turn you against each other; a ‘divide and conquer’ game.
•  Don’t be tempted and welcome his romantic seductiveness; reinforcing his feelings will make it hard for your child to outgrow them later. We all know men who have never been able to break away from their attachment to mother, find a woman to marry, and start a family of their own.
• Reject your child’s advances; the mother must explain to her boy that she is Daddy’s woman and that she loves them both equally, that he’ll grow up and find a wife of his own. And the father must do the same in regard to his daughter.
• Don’t be brutal or make fun of him; present gently and firmly the realities of the situation to him. Sooner or later he'll end up accepting them.