Weekly Series — Behavior Made Easy
At the grocery store checkout line, I heard two ladies whispering about the little girl having a ‘meltdown’ a few aisles away. One of the ladies shrugged her shoulders as she told her friend ”that mom needs to do a better job parenting her child. I can’t believe she lets her daughter get away with that behavior out in public”. The other lady just shook her head and said “people just don’t raise their kids with discipline anymore.
I quickly thought of the article I had just written “Kids prefer to do their best, if they can”.
It is natural to think that if parents raise their children the right way then they would not be acting out. Conventional thinking assumes challenging behaviors are learned and reinforced and strong consistent parenting should take care of so-called behavior problems. However, many family studies have shown that while an environment with consistent structured parenting may work for some siblings, it makes behaviors worse (anxiety, stress) for others. Acting out, whining and crying (rudimentary cohesive behaviors) are also part of normal development. All two year old’s whine and cry.
In traditional functional behavior assessment the first step is to determine the “function” of the so-called behavior. The term “function” implies the child is getting something they want or escaping something they do not want from the behavior. The short sided solution is to eliminate or replace the behavior through incentives (positive or negative reinforcement). For most behavior plans, the process stops there. Most plans only have limited success and for many there are negative long term consequences.
In the last article we concluded that kids prefer to do their best if they can.
According to Dr. Ross Green, Lives in the Balance, the philosophy you have about your child’s challenging behavior has major implications for how you will try to help. If you do believe that your child is challenging because of lagging skills and unsolved problems, then rewarding and punishment are not the ideal approach.
Solving the problems and teaching new skills makes perfect sense. Focus on developing skills in flexibility, adaptability, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. The rest will start to fall into place.
I hope this was helpful. All your comments and input are greatly appreciated. Don’t forget to follow us on Medium and join our newsletter at daVinci Publishing
