Undisciplined Preschooler

Question: Is it accurate to say that an undisciplined preschooler will continue to challenge his parents during the latter years of childhood?

Answer: It often occurs that way.  When a parent loses the early confrontations with the child, the later conflicts become harder to win.  The parent who never wins, who is to weak or to tired or too busy to win, is making a costly mistake that will usually come back to haunt him during the  child's adolescence.  If you can't make a five-year-old pick up his toys, it is unlikely that you will exercise any impressive degree of control during his adolescence, the most defiant time of life.  It is important to understand that adolescence is a condensation or composite of all the training and behavior that has gone before.  Any unsettled matter in the first twelve years is likely to fester and erupt during adolescence.  Therefore, the proper time to begin disarming the teenage time-bomb is twelve years before it arrives.

By Dr. James Dobson