Dealing with the child’s difficult behavior is often a prime area of concern for parents. Most parents think: How can I teach my daughter to keep her room clean or my toddler to stop running away when I ask him to stop playing and study?
These types of behaviors can be changed. And parents play a necessary and critical role in modifying their child’s wrong behavior as no one knows the child better than them. Firstly, parent’s need to understand “what makes their child engage in such behavior?” The goal is to figure out the cause behind that behavior and to replace it with the right behavior.
Let’s see the areas on which the parents should focus to bring a positive change in their child’s behavior.
Specification
The good or bad behavior of child must be properly defined. For example, poorly defined behavior would be “acting bad or good” whereas a well-defined behavior would be running around the room (bad) or starting homework on time (good).
Measurement
Once the targeted behaviors have been identified, the measurement of frequency of its occurrence is of utmost importance. Eg. Fights with sibling once a month/ twice in a week/ thrice a day etc.
Prioritization
Decide what behavior needs change first and what behaviors can be dealt with at a later point. As all behaviors cannot be changed at once so targeting too many problem areas might not produce success.
What came before and after
To understand and respond effectively to problematic behavior, you have to pay careful attention to what came before it and what comes after it. There are three important aspects:
- Antecedents: Preceding factors that make a behavior more or less likely to occur. Anticipating antecedents is an extremely helpful tool in preventing misbehavior.
- Behaviors: The specific actions you are trying to encourage or discourage.
- Consequences: The results that naturally follow a behavior. The more immediate the consequence, the more powerful it is.
Every behavior has some sort of reward. Children derive rewards out of problem behavior. It can be as small as getting a chocolate or a toy after incessant begging, getting everyone’s attention after a loud cry, feeling independent after an argument or winning love of others by crying etc. Behavior can be changed by providing the desired emotional reward after positive behavior instead of negative.
Catch your child’s positive actions or behaviors and reward them for that to motivate the kids to do that particular behavior more often. For e.g. give the child the freedom of choice (choosing the color of one’s clothes/ choosing which game to play etc) if he uses his manners and does not argue. Likewise, catch your child's negative actions or behaviors and offer him some sort of consequence like taking their favorite thing away.
For a child who behaves in a negative manner just to grab the attention, the best thing is to ignore the child’s behaviors and not react at all. This way he won’t get what he is seeking i.e. attention. The child will eventually decrease this behavior when he will see his parent not giving in.
But parents also need to remember that all problems in the children might not reduce to their satisfaction at once. The aim is to reduce those behaviors first that are interfering with their adaptive functioning. Eventually they will start making the right choices and exhibiting the right behavior.
