A week and a half ago I posted about stopping negative behavior, and the following was asked:
>>What about when you are really busy? mentally? Your hands are covered in red beet juice? You are nursing a baby? your surrounded by carefully folded laundry and 3YO is jumping on the sofa? Do you drop everything else? Because that is my conundrum… I have other obligations than just spending time disciplining the 3YO.<<
Being busy with other things is a real challenge that we face every day! Keeping your littles close by and in sight is very, very helpful in preempting problematic behaviors, and it’s a big first step. But realistically, you can’t preempt everything, every single time – at least I can’t!
How I respond depends on what stage my child is at. If they’re in what I consider the active training phase, then I make responding to situations that need my attention a top priority. While raising a child is ongoing, the intensive stage of teaching them what is acceptable and what isn’t is pretty finite. During this stage they’re learning that you mean what you say, every single time.
This isn’t convenient or easy for the parent. That’s part of the power of your unspoken message to them, that helping them to learn proper behavior is your top priority and they’re not going to get away with something because you’re on the phone, in a store, or in the middle of something. So if I’m nursing the baby and a child jumps on the couch, what to do when telling them to stop doesn’t produce results? I stop nursing the baby and help the jumping child to stop (as I wrote about in the above mentioned post). If I know that I won’t be able to follow up, I won’t make the request. Better to ignore something than to tell them something you have no ability to follow up on, which teaches them that you can be ignored.
Practically, it means saving certain activities for when they’re not in need of supervision – when they’re napping, in bed for the night, or when they’re visiting a grandparent. Cut down on what needs to be done – during the initial learning phase, drop your standards of your house, outside commitments, and anything else that will take away from your kids to the absolute minimum. A number of tips I shared regarding making the postpartum period easier would be useful at this time. Make super simple meals, use paper plates, and get to sleep early – it takes a lot of emotional energy.
I know how daunting it sounds to have to make supervising, preempting, and responding a top priority. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it?! But what you’ll find is that it really won’t require nearly as much effort after the initial time investment (how much that will be depends on your children and how much time they’ll need to get the message). You’ll quickly find your kids’ behavior improving, since a) you’re not waiting for situations to escalate so they aren’t becoming the huge deal they may have been before (thus require huge amounts of emotional energy), and b) you’re consistently dealing with it right away so your kids are making a clear connection between their behavior and your response. Very soon, you’ll find you’re spending much less time disciplining and much more time enjoying them. The time investment is relatively small, but the payoffs are huge!
Avivah
Thanks for posting about my question 🙂
Not to be nit-picking, but more about jumping on the couch as an example. So, you stop nursing. Is the baby now crying at being interrupted? Mine would be. Is that ok for you? When you take the toddler off the couch, don’t they just get right back on? How many times do you do that? What do you do next, if they won’t stop? Or if they then switch toward some other destructive behavior?
Is it okay that a baby is crying? I don’t like it, but I recognize that choices have to be made. Just because the baby is more vocal about having to suddenly stop nursing doesn’t mean that it’s more important than tending to the older child. Generally I can continue holding the baby while dealing with something.
Will answer the rest in another post; it’s getting to be too long for the comments section! 🙂
Avivah, could you explain what you mean by active training phase? In a large family, don’t you always have a child in that stage?
Also, what would you do if something happened when you weren’t there? In my house, a kid stuck her fingers in the brownies, probably while I was in the shower. I know exactly which kid it was. How would you handle something like that, after the fact?
I do always have a child in the training phase, but not the intensive training phase. I infrequently use the intensive phase for more than a couple of days – more than that’s for kids who aren’t used to being disciplined in a certain way and need a chance to learn your new rules and standards, or for kids who have shown they need a reminder. So I can generally give my kids more leeway than parents who are changing their expectations. When I do the ‘intensive’ with someone, it tends to be very short because I try to nip things in the bud. The behavior is much more quickly ended when it’s not a well entrenched pattern.
If I wasn’t there and it was a situation like you described, I wouldn’t make a big deal about it. There are things that matter and things that don’t. What concerns me most is attitude and interpersonal behavior. Speaking unkindly to a sibling or hitting are things I’d step in for in most circumstances, even if I wasn’t there when it happened (generally speaking – this depends on the situation). Brownie experimentation is annoying but not really important.
If I felt it was important, I’d quietly take the child aside and tell them I know that it was a big temptation for them (or whatever you think their reasoning was), but we want our brownies to be nice for everyone to eat. If it was an older child (say, eight to ten years old) who did this more than once, or a child about 6 -8 who did this repeatedly, then he’d lose the chance to have brownies when everyone else had them. But I wouldn’t do that for a one time situation.
Thank you, that’s helpful. What do you do if a child speaks unkindly to a sibling? Especially if you didn’t hear the actual interaction. Do you ask them to repeat the same thing kindly several times?
If I didn’t hear it, I wouldn’t do anything – I try not to encourage tattling and I’d have to take the word of one child over another. If I overheard it myself, I’d have them repeat themselves nicely.
Another question. How old is the intensive training phase about? Also, how do you know that they are in that stage, vs. acting out to get more attention?
I’ll try to post a response to this soon.
I’ve been going over a lot of info from your parenting posts tonight, b/c my almost 4 yr old DS has been acting out and I would love to hear the answers to Yehudis’ questions because they seem very timely for me
Okay, here’s the basic answer. The training phase (I consider it regular parenting more than a phase) begins when they are very young, definitely by two. By doing this, it keeps a lot of bad habits from becoming established, teaches them what your boundaries are, etc.
If your child is flouting your rules, acting up, talking back – it depends on what you consider problem behavior – then it’s time for the intensive phase, to remind them of the things they may have learned and forgotten (usually due to our inconsistency) or not learned at all.