You may have heard that you teach people how to treat you. For parents, this applies to our children, especially when it comes to finding a bad behavior fix. We teach our children how to treat the people in the world around them—including their siblings, teachers, and us!—by what we allow, what stop, and what we reinforce.
People don’t do things if it doesn’t get them what they want. You don’t go to the refrigerator unless there’s something there that sounds good. You don’t get up and go to work unless there is some benefit to the process. Behavior that doesn’t work, stops. Only behavior that works keeps happening.
So, if your child is acting ridiculous and they keep doing it…say it with me… it means it is working for them. Somehow, that bad behavior is helping them get something they want. This is completely infuriating, but relief is in sight: there is one simple step necessary to make the bad behavior stop. This is your bad behavior fix.
To stop bad behavior, it cannot result in good things.
Throwing a tantrum cannot result in getting out of putting on your shoes. Yelling at the dinner table cannot result in getting to go to your room without having to finish eating dinner. Getting distracted cannot result in missing out on chore time. Hitting your sister cannot result in getting grounded from going to scouts if you never wanted to go in the first place.
As parents, we yield to behavior like this all the time, sometimes because we are distracted, sometimes because we are just so unbelievably tired that we can’t see straight, sometimes because we are trying to do things all the right way, but we aren’t paying careful attention to the behavior and the results of the behavior.
Make this your mantra: good things come after good behavior. Good things cannot come after bad behavior.
Don’t get confused. This isn’t some kind of controlling carrot and stick parenting. Kids need hugs, kids need praise, kids need encouragement, kids need gifts for absolutely no reason at all, kids need their parents to swoop in and shower them with an overabundance of love and affection.
Parents should be doing these things with their kids all the time. There is a massive power in an overflow of good stuff for no reason at all—this is called non-contingent reinforcement and it is the most underused power player in the parenting toolbox.
When applying your bad behavior fix, just make sure that kids don’t get things they really want as the result of bad behavior. It’s a one-step, one-stop, no-pressure kind of process. If the behavior is bad, don’t let the result be something good.
Like what you’re learning? Pin it for later!
