Disciplining your child: 3 ways to calmly deal with bad behaviour
An expert weighs in.
By David Lister, Lead Practitioner, Practice and Impact Management Team, The Benevolent Society
Having a child who doesn’t respond to discipline can be concerning for parents. Despite their best parenting efforts, their child isn’t learning that errant behaviour is unacceptable. And so it continues, leaving the parent wondering what to do next.
This can be a particular frustration for parents whose discipline approaches worked for their older kids, but not for the younger one.
Whether it’s a six-year-old that hits when he doesn’t get his way, or a fourteen-year-old that picks a fight with her siblings every time they step off the school bus, there are some key things to remember when encouraging more positive behaviour in your child.
1. Be predictable
Having an emotional reaction to your child’s misbehaviour isn’t going to help them learn. Even worse, it can escalate things.
What can be useful is using the same sentence structure when disciplining. For example, you could say: “If you do (insert behaviour here) again, then I’ll do (consequence or action I will take).”
It means you don’t have to expect much from your upset brain in the heat of the moment because your response has become automatic.
Having this kind of predictability and simplicity in the way you communicate also helps ensure you’re being abundantly (and often repeatedly) clear with the child about what the result of their behaviour will be.
Having emotional reaction to your child’s misbehaviour isn’t going to help them learn.
2. Focus on the most important learning
Avoid adding additional consequences to the escalating behaviour or while your child is still processing the first consequence you’ve given. I’ve seen it before when a parent starts the discipline process by declaring that they are going to confiscate the child’s bike for a week, then, when the misbehaviour doesn’t stop, they start adding more weeks, then more…
Multiple consequences mean your child must sift through multiple learnings. It can also escalate and lengthen the conflict. Longer conflict means it will be even longer before your child will learn what you want them to. If your child’s behaviour escalates in response to a consequence, stay focused on the most important lesson you want them to learn.
For example, you could say as calmy as you can: “I can see you’re really upset about not being allowed to ride your bike. Yelling at me won’t change my mind.”
Try to remain calm even when your child is upset and yelling.
3. Calm down before learning
While responding quickly to challenging behaviour is important, the learning consequence shouldn’t be applied until your child is fully out of meltdown territory. Recent research shows that being in a stressed state, such as a meltdown, reduces learning by impacting attention, memory and recall.
It takes at least 20 minutes for the human body to calm down after being in distress, so that gives you a guide on the minimum amount of time to wait.
You can revisit the issue later, saying for example: “When you were fighting with your sister this morning, you hit me. That means we don’t put a token in the reward jar for today. Hitting people is not okay. If you go a whole morning tomorrow without hurting someone else, then you can put a token in the reward jar.”
Or you can make sure they’re calm before asking them to think about what they did. “Remember yesterday when I took your bike away on our walk? You rode away and I couldn’t see you, I was worried you might ride the wrong way and get lost, or maybe get hit by a car. I love you so much and you’re really important to me. What were you trying to do?” Then listen to their response.
I wish you all the best on your parenting journey.
