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Chiming in to say I think 4 is just hard!! DD is so emotional and the most ridiculous things will set her off and I feel like she is harder to console or redirect bc she's older and smarter now. She knows what we are trying to do and instead of going along with it she just gets more upset. We try to let her have some "space" to get over it for a few minutes, then I try to console her which rarely works honestly.. not sure why I try but it makes me sad to see her upset. Then we'll end up having to sternly talk to her and tell her she's cried/whined about "it" long enough and it's time to move on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it gets really bad DH usually threatens time out.. sometimes I count (her teachers do this so it gets her attention). Mostly we just try to get through it.

So not much help but definitely can commiserate!

No advice, just commiseration - B turns four in two weeks and the mood swings are almost as wild as the tantrums.

DS is five and really dramatic sometimes. He's a very mature kid, but some things set him off and then, so much drama. I really have to be better about avoiding those things, because I know what they are. He doesn't like to be disciplined, even if he knows he did something bad. It's even worse if I lose my temper, but even if I put him in time-out calmly, you'd think I've grounded him for life.

And then he yells at me for being a mean mommy. A couple of days ago I just went and asked, if he doesn't like time-outs, what he thinks I should do if he's misbehaving and doesn't respond to nicely being asked to cut it out. That made him stop and think a little... I hope.

I don’t have a lot of tips, but school breaks are always a struggle for us. The kids are so thrown off of their routine, and I don’t have many tricks in my hat has DD1’s teacher. Is it all the time that he is highly emotional, or does it seem to be super bad now?

3 was the difficult age for us, with DD1’s emotions running very high. I agree with what some others have said about giving some space and then taking time after he has a minute to cool down to sit with him for a long cuddle. As we got closer to 4 and DD1 could articulate why she was getting so emotional that really helped. Now I ask her to take a deep breath and let me know why she is crying/hitting/tantruming and she’ll say she is hungry/tired/wants me to hold her.

I started asking my son what he needed me to do in order to help him understand or cope with the rules/things I asked of him. Just the act of having that conversation with him diffuses the situation and it also gives me insight into how well he understands what is expected of him. Then, I can figure out how to troubleshoot.

For the going to bed thing, is the bedroom dark enough? My son had the same issue in the summer, and we had a conversation about how the earth and sun change their positions and we read an age appropriate book about what was going on and it was like a lightbulb went on and he understood the total number of hours in the day was the same, but we had more light time during parts of the year.