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16.07.2016
Managing behaviour in children
Parenting Children with Difficult BehavioursDoes your child often:
- Seem angry
- Lose their temper
- Argue
- Deliberately annoy others
- Refuse to do as they are asked
- Blame others for their mistakes
- Get annoyed easily
- Act resentful or be spiteful
- …and does this occur a lot more than is appropriate for their age? Is this interfering with home life, or with friendships or at school?
- There are a variety of reasons for such behaviour and a range of possible causes need to be canvassed
- Temperament, modelling and genetics can sometimes play a part
- Behaviour often has a hidden payoff for the child, there is often some function in the child's behaviour. Learnt behaviour What can be done to help?
- Learn to identify the high risk times when behaviour is most likely to occur. For example, is it when your child is asked to get off the ipad, have a shower, etc?
- Help the parent identify how they currently respond to aggressive behaviour
- Learning specific techniques to manage difficult behaviour is often necessary. Minimising inconsistent or explosive discipline can help, as can removing ‘accidental rewards’ for certain behaviours (e.g. like paying attention to a child who is acting out)
- Learning to focus on positive behaviour, remembering the 80% to 20% rule, that means lets focus on positive connection 80% of the time and only correct 20% of the time. Often when undesirable behaviours are occuring it can be common that the child is only getting attention when he / she is misbehaving.. First step... focus on connecting...
- Teaching an awareness of emotions and how to regulate them
- Building empathy in the childUnderstanding Attachment
- The importance of connection (as above Connect First). Dan Siegel, psychiatrist has some great books (The Whole Brain Child is one of our favourites at Brilliant Minds Psychology)
- How to reward with rich attachment cues, and discipline with neutral attachment cues
- The role of attribution (how the way we think about the causes of difficult behaviour helps or hinders how we cope with it)
- The role of warm but firm parenting
- Mirroring your child to build self esteem
- The parenting team
- Reflecting on your own parent values... What sort of parent do you want to be?
