Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here he explains the best methods for parents to stop their children from exhibiting negative behaviors.
When you are looking at extinguishing established negative behavior, rather than punishing children, you can instead remove them from the situation where they want to be.
Whether you are at the mall, the store, the car, or at the gym, parents are encouraged to take their child who is not behaving appropriately to a lobby or other room, where they can still watch what is going but are not able to participate. Or worse yet, at My Gym, parents can take their child to a room where they can shut the door, watch through the mirror glass, but the child is really starting to feel quarantined or isolated.
Additionally, short consequences work better with younger children than longer consequences. For example, time out is basically a minute a year. For a three-year-old, time outs that are more than three minutes are not as effective as time outs under three minutes.
Another option parents have is to remove their child for something like 30 seconds, let him ocalm down, and then re-enter the original environment after talking about what behaviors are going to be expected. After going back in, if everything is good, then that’s great. If the negative behavior appears again, then the parents can once again try going outside with the child—possibly for a little longer this time—before trying the situation again. If you haul them out for 10, 15, 20 minutes it just gets to be so negative they lost sight of whatever they did 20 minutes ago. They are three years old—it is over.
Here are some tips for parents:
- Do it immediately: Hopefully you are going to be able to physically start to remove them while they are doing the negative behavior, rather than waiting until later to discipline.
- Talk about what you want to see happening: Communicate with your child about exactly what type of behavior is expected. At My Gym, we have a time when we all sit on maps. I always take the time to tell the good kids, “I like the way you are sitting on the mat. I like the way you are sitting so quietly.” To a large degree, you should not even address the poorly behaved child, since that attention promote more of the bad behavior. Focus your attention on what the other children are doing right.
- Use the minute per year rule: When it comes to time out, parents should stick to the rule of putting children in time out for each year. So a two-year-old would never stay in time out for longer than two minutes, for example, while a five-year-old would be there for five minutes. Any longer, and the child likely will not understand what they did wrong in the first place.
- Have a time out place: When you are at home, it is a good idea to have a time out place where you are going to have a place to sit—many people do it on the stars. You can also have an egg timer.
- Ask them to explain: As they get a little older, the next level up is to ask your child to explain what he or she did wrong. Once they can be calm, accept the consequences, explain what they did, and agree not to do it again then you can acknowledge it and move on with life.
Common Mistakes
A common mistake many parents make is that they want to be their child’s friend instead of their child’s mother of father. Kids need parents. There are going to be lots of friends, lots of uncles, lots of aunts, all the neighbors. But they need parents who are going to be able to provide them the security of a consistent structure in their life in order to achieve success.
In addition, children are calmer and more comfortable when they know their limits. Healthy parents set the parameters for their children and their children become secure and know that they don’t have to put their energy into testing the limits. Instead, they can put their energy into more positive behaviors.
