My 3 year-old has been having INSANE meltdowns for weeks. It escalated to the point that I started feeling sick at the thought of leaving the house, because the meltdowns were all about her shoes. It's been a nightmare.My 3 year-old had problems with shoes from her first steps. We've tried many kinds of shoes. In the last year, I thought we finally came to a good place, then she regressed horribly and it's been a hard summer. We let her go barefoot (her preference) as much as possible, but that's not always appropriate. It's gotten so bad that she started refusing to go to the park to play or for playdates and she's a very active and social kid. I started feeling ill at the thought of leaving the house with her, because I know it's going to be a minimum of 30 minutes of screaming, but lately it's been more 60+ minutes and I'm sick of the stares we get from other people.Every day, dropping my 5 year-old at kindergarten and dropping my 3 year-old at preschool has been a complete nightmare. Many days have included 30 - 90 minutes of screaming, refusing to walk and throwing her shoes at me. She's enormous and my back is injured, so I'm not carrying her. We live 2 blocks from the school and the school is big enough that, if we did drive, we've have to park 2 blocks away anyway. She refused to ride in the stroller and she's smart/quick enough to get out of the harness, if she wants to. She says only babies ride in strollers. So, we'd walk the busy sidewalks the two blocks to school while she screamed, cried and threw her shoes at me. To make matters complicated, my other child has an autism similar diagnosis and getting him calmly to school can be it's own challenge.I've been racking my brain. We tried incentives and rewards. I praised the hell out of her. I assumed that maybe this was about anxiety around school (it's not - she loves school) and I tried to address that. I took pictures of her happy in the class. I took videos of her after class telling me how fun it was to try to remind my daughter that she likes school. No effect.I tried some mild consequences (put a favorite toy in the basement for a few days) and those probably just escalated the tantrums. I figured they would, but I was getting desperate last week.FINALLY, I remembered that she loves her loose rainboots. But, why? Because her rainboots are huge, I put her in 2 pairs of socks and she loves it. I put her in two pairs of socks in her normal shoes and SHE'S SUDDENLY FINE. YES!!!!!!!!!!! She's happy. She's calm. She can't wait to go to school. She seems like her old self again. Phew! We've left the house 5 times in the last 48 hours with zero drama. ZERO!!!!! I feel like I can breathe again.I wish it hadn't taken me almost an entire month to figure this out, but I'm glad that I've been persistent enough to finally find a solution. Happy dance :-D via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2OB8QlP
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