"I Hate You" Talk

Any preschool teacher will tell you that your daughter's behavior is completely normal for a four-year-old. Preschool and kindergarten kids use "You're not my friend" as code for everything from "I want my way!" to "I'm tired of playing with you now." These threats are standard preschool power plays, along with "If you don't do what I want, then you can't come to my birthday party!"

However, there is a lot you can and should do to discourage this kind of behavior, especially because your daughter is doing more than expressing anger, she is using the threat of complete disengagement. Kids are by nature forgiving, but her threats may indeed drive other kids away, and this is a perfect age for your daughter to learn more appropriate negotiating skills before she pulls out the nuclear option. It's our job as parents to teach these skills. How?

1. Don't use discipline strategies that make use of threats, power plays (punishment of any sort), or social exclusion (timeouts), because you don't want to model those things. Instead, set appropriate limits, enforced with empathy. Kids whose parents use empathy as their primary parenting tool are receiving constant training in empathy and are much less likely to be mean to others.

2. Make sure your daughter gets plenty of opportunities to make her own choices and feel powerful in her life. Much like a toddler reveling in the power of "no," preschoolers abuse social exclusion more if that's the only time they get to feel powerful.

3. Sensitize your daughter to other people's experience by constantly commenting on how others feel so she sees things from other people's viewpoints. ("Look, that boy is crying. I wonder why?" or "Jenna seemed so happy when you hugged her." It's crucial that children develop this skill, not just so that they're nice people (although we all want that for our kids) but because reading the social cues of others is the only way to function in a complicated social world.

4. Have a discussion with your daughter, when she isn't angry, about how she thinks it makes her friends feel to hear these comments. Tell her that you know she is mad when she says these things, and it must seem to her that they are true at the time. Ask her if, in retrospect, she actually meant them. Agree with her that when we're mad it's hard not to say angry things.

5. If your daughter tells you about one of these incidents after the fact, let her blow off steam by describing the incident, while you reflect what she's saying: "Sounds like you were hurt when Cassie wanted to let the other kids join your game, because you wanted to play with just the two of you. You were sad inside. You felt hurt, so you wanted to hurt Cassie back. So you said angry things to her." If she insists that she meant what she said, don't make the mistake of validating her anger. Anger is always a response to underlying hurt, fear or sadness. Look for those underlying feelings, validate them, and help your daughter acknowledge them.

6. Help your daughter find words that actually express her real feelings that she could say next time, like "Cassie, I love playing our game with just us right now. I like the other kids, too, but maybe we can play with them later?"

7. Help your daughter to reinterpret other kids' behavior when she is over-reacting. "Cassie likes you a lot. She also likes to play with the other kids because that's fun, too. She always likes you, whether or not other kids are around."

8. Talk to your daughter before her play dates about what might happen, and how she could respond if she gets hurt, sad, angry, and so on. Let her know that all her feelings are fine and can be expressed directly, but that she has a responsibility to be considerate of others. Help her to experiment with saying what she needs. She can say things such as "I'm sorry; I don't feel like sharing right now," or "I'm scared of climbing high like you do."

9. Teach your daughter skills to manage her anger and frustration. Can she carry a squeezy ball in her pocket to squee