The Place In The Grove Presents

Address the Behaviour, Don’t Criticize The Child (Catch them being Good)

 When a parent must address a child’s undesirable behaviour, damage to the child’s self-esteem can be avoided when the parent describes the behaviour, rather than labelling the child as a bad person.  It is not the child that you don’t like; it is the child’s behaviour.  The distinction makes a very big difference in your effectiveness when dealing with problems. 

Saying, “What’s the matter with you?” is an attack on self-esteem.  The child can feel rejected by his parent and need to escape the unpleasantness by going outside until they have cooled down.   The child’s  needs for safety, love and self-esteem were violated. Repeated incidents like this are guaranteed to make a child feel unsafe, unloved and unworthy.

Yelling from another room an affirmative statement like, “You are going to break something” is not a clear way to communicate to a young child.  It is too indirect and has the affect of encouraging him to play with the ball until something breaks.  It is better to have eye contact and to speak directly to the child when the issue is an important one.

If the parent had been more direct by coming into the room, squatting down next to the child, looking him in the eye and saying something like, “I don’t want anything broken by your playing ball in the house.  We need to agree on a place where you can play where things won’t get broken,  the child would have understood what to do.

In the second example, the child is taught acceptable behavior.  The parent follows through and sees that he plays or behaves appropriately.

When children  meet their agreements successfully, have a discussion with them describing the behavior rather than the person.  Learn to not use general praise, “What a Good Boy” “You are terrific” vs. “You did a good job on this”  “This is terrific, I am so pleased with how hard you worked on this.”

The Job Not Quite Finished

The important point here is that the job is not quite finished, start with what the child did accomplish before moving into what wasn’t done.  I.e. “You did a nice job of dusting, making your bed, and straightening your dresser.  When you take the garbage out you will be finished.”

No Effort

What do you do if there has been no effort to complete an agreed upon job?

Go back to step 1 and go deeper than the surface behavior.  Remember to use only statement sentences.  “I thought we had an agreement that you would wash the car this afternoon,” I don’t understand what has happened”  Receptive listening is called for, and asking for a new agreement.

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