Tag Archives: behavior modification

Should you Negotiate your Childs Curfew?

Photo by Flickr
Photo by Flickr

There are times when your thirteen year old may seem like a seasoned litigator, and your kitchen feels like a courtroom. Kids are surprisingly adept at negotiating, and sometimes it’s hard to “beat them at their own game.” It’s important to teach kids how to negotiate because it’s a necessary life skill, and it helps create kids who can function independently. They need to learn healthy ways to interact with people to get what they need.

What they don’t need to learn is that they can negotiate with you to decrease your power as a parent. In most negotiations, one person has more power than the other. In parenting situations, it’s the child who has less power, and he is looking to be empowered. In conflict situations, it’s really that he either wants to do something you don’t want him to do or he doesn’t want to do something you want him to do.

As parents, we don’t set out to over-negotiate. We mean well, and we “fall into it.” When our kids whine, argue or resist, we give in or back off because we see it as a shortcut to compliance. If we negotiate with him, he’ll comply more readily. We also do it because we’re haunted by ghosts from our own childhood: “My mother never listened to me, so I’m not going to do that to my kids.”

Parents who over-negotiate with their children usually have good motives at heart, but the outcome is unhealthy. Usually, they are responding to some sort of coercion. They do it to avoid a power struggle or a meltdown. Kids learn that they can negotiate away the structure you’ve put in place in the home and, as a result, they can negotiate away your power and authority within that structure. They learn that you’ll give it away or give up if they push hard enough.

Nearly every parent finds themselves negotiating around the issue of their child’s curfew, whether it’s the time they’re expected home on a school night or on the weekends. When your child pushes you to extend the time by another half hour or hour, you can quickly find yourself in a pointless argument or backing down to avoid one. I recommend following these specific rules when your child wants to negotiate about curfew.

Parents should not negotiate predetermined agreements and responsibilities. You can say, “You agreed to be home by 6 o’clock on school nights. That’s what we agreed to when we talked about this. It’s your responsibility. We’re not going to talk about it anymore.”

Parents should not negotiate extending their child’s curfew over the phone, whether it’s 15 minutes or an hour before they’re expected home. If the child wants a later curfew, he has to come home on time now. Then he can sit down with you at another time to discuss a later curfew. He can’t change it on the night he wants to break it. Or you can approach it this way: Sit down with him when things are calm and say, “If you want a later curfew, come home on time on your regular curfew three times in a row and then we’ll talk about changing it. But if you can’t come home on time on this one, why should I give you a later one?” Remember, keeping your curfew is a responsibility, and you don’t negotiate responsibilities.

Don’t negotiate with the child when he’s trying to wrangle a later curfew with you through force. If he’s calling you and getting into a power struggle about “I don’t wanna come home yet,” don’t attend the fight you’re being invited to. Tell him you expect him home at his normal curfew, remind him of the consequence for not being home on time, and hang up.

Don’t negotiate your child’s curfew “on the spot.” Kids will do this to you all the time. They’ll bring up the issue of when they have to be home when you’re busy, stressed or distracted, thinking it will be easier to get you to give in. If your child wants to talk to you about his curfew while you’re making dinner, tell him you’ll talk about it after dinner at seven o’clock. Give yourself some time to think it through. When you meet at seven, both you and your child will likely have more of a clear head about the matter. Remember, just because your child asks you to talk about it doesn’t mean you have to give up the answer immediately. Take some time to think before you respond.

For three decades, behavioral therapist James Lehman, MSW, has worked with troubled teens and children with behavior problems. He has developed a practical, real-life approach to managing children and adolescents that teaches them how to solve social problems without hiding behind a facade of defiant, disrespectful, or obnoxious behavior. He has taught his approach to parents, teachers, state agencies and treatment centers in private practice and now through The Total Transformation® Program.

The Total Transformation Program® is a comprehensive step-by-step, multi-media, child behavior modification program for child behavior problems like oppositional defiance disorder and child anger issues.

Low Self Esteem in Kids Part I: Forget what you’ve Heard, It’s a Myth

Photo by Flickr
Photo by Flickr

Is your child struggling with low self-esteem? As a parent, it’s tough to stand by and see our children feeling like they don’t “measure up” or can’t handle things as well as their peers seem to do. Here we debunk the myth of focusing on children’s feelings at the expense of teaching them how to master life-skills.

Self-esteem, self-worth and self-respect are interchangable phrases we use to identity the feeling of everything being OK, that we’re going to be all right. Kids’ self-esteem is constantly being challenged because they’re constantly challenged with new things to experience. Every day in a child’s life, there are new opportunities and new tasks to deal with. And so their self-esteem, their sense of “I can handle it,” is constantly being put to the test. To state it simply, if your child is able to deal with things, if they have support and they learn how to solve life’s problems, their sense of self-esteem grows. If they don’t know how to manage this, their self-esteem diminishes and in fact, doesn’t develop the way it should.

One of the critical truths you need to know about your child’s self-esteem is that you cannot fix it as a parent. You’ll go crazy, you’ll drive your kid crazy, and you’ll find yourself having screaming arguments and fights trying to make all the pieces fit so that he doesn’t experience any discomfort. Instead, you have to learn how to give your child the tools to deal with his problems. And make no bones about it, in this world, how to have self-esteem is a problem we all have to solve, every day. Remember, dealing with something is often the solution. If your child fails a test, the best thing he or she can do is handle it emotionally by recognizing they’re in control of getting a better grade next time. What this means is that they learn how not to take their disappointment out on other people, to not beat themselves up, and to try again. And parents need to be concerned about self-esteem, but in a way that empowers them to teach their kids the skills they need.

So as a parent, how do you build this quality in kids? In my experience, kids develop self-esteem by doing things that are hard for them. To give you an example, when my son was young and he learned to tie his shoes, we were proud of him and praised him. But when he was eight and he tied his shoes, it was no longer a noteworthy event. When your child solves a problem that’s challenging and relevant to them now-and not just doing the same thing over and over again and being successful and getting praised for it-itbuilds self-esteem.

If you’re rewarding your kids for things that are artificial, understand this: those artificial rewards don’t build genuine self-esteem. At best, they build artificial self-esteem, which means your child feels better for a few minutes, but then goes downhill when the realistic challenges of his life surface. So if you’re still telling your child “nice job” for tying his shoe laces when he’s eight years old, that’s not going to accomplish anything. It may be a nice thing to do, because it’s always important to give your kids encouragement as often as you can, but since tying his shoes isn’t hard for him, that will not develop self-esteem. It won’t lead him to develop self-respect and it’s not going to help him solve the problem of feeling good about himself appropriately. If your goal is to show your child how he can build self-esteem-to learn how to manage problems and feel good about himself-that kind of praise is not going to get you there. You have to look at self-esteem through the framework of problem solving. Feeling good about yourself is a problem you have to solve. You solve it by learning how to do things better, not by talking about it and feeling better artificially.

If Your Child Has a Learning or Behavioral Disability: The Pitfalls of Special Ed.

Some special education programs falter with kids because the educators in those programs ask their students to do easy tasks in an attempt to make them feel better. And then they say, “Oh, great job,” and they give them A’s and 100’s on their work. But the fact is, your child knows what he’s doing is easy for him. Though he might get some momentary gratification, he doesn’t get any real self-esteem out of it. Your child might feel good about himself and come home and tell you, “Look Mom, I got an A.” But after that’s over, he doesn’t feel more confident about his ability to manage life or deal with his problems.

If your child has ADD or ADHD, dyslexia, or dyscalculia, or any label in that range of learning or behavioral disabilities, their perception very often becomes, “I don’t see the world the same way other people do.” Certainly that’s going to challenge their self-esteem, because they’re constantly going to see themselves as being a little off in social situations. As they grow older, that becomes pretty pervasive. Their sense is, “Uh oh, I’m different.” And kids interpret “different” as “stupid.” To them, “I’m different” means “I’m ugly.” “I’m different” means “I’m a loser, I’m an outsider.” Believe me, those are scary things for a kid. But the answer for children with disabilities is the same, in my mind. You may have to gauge tasks differently, but the main principle still applies-have your child tackle things that are challenging for him or her that will help their self-esteem grow. There’s a saying that I use: “If you want to develop self-esteem, do things that you can esteem. And if you want self-respect, you have to do things that you can respect.” And that’s true for everyone.

Counseling and Your Child’s Self-Esteem

The theory behind counseling that focuses on feelings is that if people feel better, they’ll think and behave better. But I’m afraid I haven’t found that to be the case in the 30 years I practiced. In fact, what I discovered was quite the opposite: when people behave better, they begin to feel better, they begin to be more successful and they start to think about themselves differently. Here’s what I’ve discovered: you can’t feel your way to better behavior, but you can behave your way to better feelings.

Don’t misunderstand, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on helping your child express his feelings. Just know that it’s not going to help his problem-solving skill development, it’s not going to help his mastery of difficult tasks, and it’s not going to give him the means to produce self-esteem himself. Another saying I like is: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, he can feed himself forever.” So, if you make your child feel good, he feels good for today, or for the moment. But if you show him what to do to feel good about himself, he can use those skills for the rest of his life.

Challenge the Thinking that Creates the Self-Esteem Problem

If you want to challenge a child who’s having behavioral issues and self-esteem problems, you have to confront the thinking they use to justify inappropriate behavior. So here’s what that would look like: Let’s say your child has an excuse for why he didn’t do his homework. As a parent, number one, you want to get him to complete his assignment. And number two, you want to let him know that giving you an excuse is not going to help; you want to challenge that kind of faulty belief.

Here’s how excuse-making breaks down in relation to self-esteem: Imagine that one child goes to school without his homework done, while another child has done the day’s assignment. The student who hasn’t finished his math homework feels bad-he’s angry, he’s frustrated. He watches the other kids hand in their work, and then the teacher says, “Where’s your homework, Ben?” She doesn’t listen to his excuses, she just gives him a poor grade. So Ben feels even worse. Later on that day when he sees a counselor, they talk about his homework problem with the goal of getting Ben to feel good, hoping that he’ll do the work if he feels better. When Ben walks out of the counselor’s office, he’s feeling OK, but within 30 minutes, when he fails to hand in his science homework, he’s frustrated and angry again. That night when he goes home, he hasn’t learned anything new, and the cycle starts over again.

But the child who completed his homework has every reason to feel good about himself. He’s mastered something; he’s on top of his responsibilities. And so that night when he goes home, he simply does his homework again. He may not understand how powerful his actions are, but in reality, he’s learning successful habits that breed self-esteem. Without a doubt, the more people learn how to be independent and do things independently, the higher their self-esteem is going to be, and the better they’re going to feel about themselves.

In fact, if you tested kids with solid self-esteem, you would find that they score high on independence and high on problem-solving skills. I believe that independence is one of the most important characteristics that a child can have, but parents don’t realize that, because no one tells them that truth. Many parents try to make their child like every other kid, when really, there are things they can be doing to help their child build independence. I believe this is one of the most important qualities a child can acquire in life.

How Can I Teach My Child the Skills They Need to Develop Self-Esteem?

If you have a child with low self-esteem or behavioral or social problems, you may have to actually develop a different set of parenting skills to help them. In the beginning of a child’s life, parents often have an ideal of what they will be like. For example, they might think he’ll be a good athlete, be well-liked, and do well in school. Or that maybe he’ll misbehave from time to time, but that he’ll learn from his mistakes when corrected. But when parents get a child who acts angry all the time, has low self-esteem, won’t deal with things in an appropriate way, and doesn’t admit mistakes, they simply don’t know what to do. Often, they still try to parent the child they wish they had instead of learning how to parent the child they have.

Most parents I’ve dealt with are doing just that when I first meet them. I’ll tell you what I’ve told them: the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of kids out there with problems that need a broader range of skills and deeper insight than other kids do. It’s not that this is an impossible task, but it’s one that may well need direct and immediate action on your part

For three decades, behavioral therapist James Lehman, MSW, has worked with troubled teens and children with behavior problems. He has developed a practical, real-life approach to managing children and adolescents that teaches them how to solve social problems without hiding behind a facade of defiant, disrespectful, or obnoxious behavior. He has taught his approach to parents, teachers, state agencies and treatment centers in private practice and now through The Total Transformation® Program.

The Total Transformation Program® is a comprehensive step-by-step, multi-media, child behavior modification program for child behavior problems like oppositional defiance disorder and child anger issues.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_Lehman

Do You Parent with Your Wallet?

heart of money

Photo by Flikr
Photo by Flickr

What kid doesn’t love it when Mom or Dad spends money on them? When you can afford it, buying things for your children is fun. But there’s a point where we buy things for our kids for the wrong reasons: to win their allegiance or simply to get them to stop screaming. Where is the line between generosity and parenting with your wallet, and what’s the danger of crossing that line? What’s the best approach to take when your ex-spouse spends on the kids instead of parenting them?

One of the ineffective roles parents fall into is what I call “Deep Pockets.” In the deep pockets style of parenting, parents buy things that their children demand in order to promote appropriate functioning in their children. There’s a difference between buying things to reward your child’s appropriate functioning and buying things in an attempt to get your child to function appropriately. When you buy your daughter a new hoodie because you asked her to do the dishes this week and she did it, that’s a reward. When you buy your daughter a new hoodie because she’s talking ugly to you and her siblings and you want her to stop or you’re afraid of her outburst if you say no, that’s deep pockets parenting.

How much is too much? When your child feels “entitled.”

When you spend money on your child based on his performance, what you’re teaching is “I love you, I want to share with you, and you’re worthwhile.” The child learns that appropriate functioning earns him good things. But when you buy things for your child to avoid his wrath or as a bribe for appropriate functioning, the child learns, “I don’t have to earn anything. It’s easy to get things. I’m more powerful than my parents are. There’s a reward for manipulating my parents, and I’m entitled to all the good things.” There’s nothing more destructive than kids getting a false sense of entitlement. It’s one of the big problems with kids and teenagers today, and it really affects their work ethic. When you talk to kids, they think they’re going to be rappers, athletes and superstars. But when you ask them what they’re doing to prepare for that now or how they’re going to get there, they have no idea.

A child is entitled to be treated lovingly and respectfully by his parents and have his needs met-food, shelter and the things the family can afford. He’s not entitled to a $150 pair of sneakers, especially when his little sister has to wear a $12 pair. Parents unknowingly promote this false sense of entitlement in pre-adolescence. Then in adolescence and the later teen years, when the kid is demanding things, they don’t know how to make it stop. I’ve worked with parents who can’t imagine taking the kid’s car away when the kid is verbally abusing them and doing bad things to his siblings. The parents have the idea that he’s entitled to the car, the kid has the same idea, and if they take away the car, who knows what’s going to happen? They live in fear of the kid’s sense of entitlement. They have backed themselves into a tough corner.

The Dos and Don’ts of Spending on Kids

There’s nothing wrong with giving kids things you can afford. They don’t get spoiled by that. They get spoiled by not having to meet their responsibilities. If a kid is meeting his responsibilities, if he’s respectful at home, and you’ve got some money, buy him the video game. If it fits in with your lifestyle, family and budget, don’t worry about over-rewarding appropriate performance. But it should be based on the child’s performance and it has to be consistent with your honest lifestyle. You have to live within your value structure when it comes to spending on your kids. For example, if your family has rules about no violence in the home, then don’t reward with violent video games.

Don’t get into debt to get your kids things they want. If you’re uncomfortable with the price, share that with the child. “We can’t afford it” is a fair thing to say. There’s no shame in this. It’s a way to teach your child that we all have to live within our means. My son used to ask us why my wife and I both had to work, because he had to go to an after school program for a couple of hours. We would be honest with him and say that we had to work to afford our lifestyle. If he wanted the things that he wanted, we both had to work. If we couldn’t afford something, we told him flat out, “We can’t afford it.”

Don’t use money or material goodies as a shortcut for doing the work of parenting. If you’re buying your kid things in order to get peace in the home, it’s not real peace. You can get out of this ineffective “deep pockets” role by having a discussion with your child. I’ll show you what that discussion looks like below.

If you have an ex-spouse who uses deep pockets…

Many divorced families have a dynamic where one parent (often the parent who does not have primary custody) overspends, out of guilt, to use bribery to get allegiance, or simply because they lack effective parenting skills. Separated or divorced parents should not “confront” one another because there’s too much unfinished business in these relationships to take on a confrontation. But they should discuss with the other parent how much is being spent and on what. If you’re the parent with less financial security, remember two things. 1.) It’s okay to explain to the child that you have less money than the other parent. It’s this simple: “I have less money than daddy because my money has to go further.” 2.) It’s not okay to say Daddy’s cheap or Daddy’s bad. Don’t get into that. If you do, then you force your child to defend his father. If the child doesn’t defend him verbally, he’s going to do it internally. So you don’t want to label daddy. You just want to say, “I don’t have the money.” Is it ok to say, “Daddy didn’t send the check?” Yes. Is it okay to make judgments around daddy because he didn’t send the check? No. Provide the information, not the characterization.

In a separation or divorce situation, when one parent asks the other to reduce their spending on the kids, the spending parent hears, “You’re trying to take my power away from me.” Power is a big issue in separated and divorced parenting. But if Daddy is buying the child too many toys, one thing a parent can do is make it clear that those toys stay at Daddy’s. There will be some anger about that from both the Daddy and the child. But you have to establish that it’s a rule in your home. Just like you have different rules about bedtime. You go to bed at 10 o’clock at Daddy’s. You go to bed a 9 o’clock here. You can play with those toys at Daddy’s. You can’t play with them here. If the child argues with you and asks why he can’t have the toys here that he has at Daddy’s, talk to him when he’s calm, and explain that they have to stay at Daddy’s because he bought them for you. Mommy and Daddy are not together anymore. It gets harder as the child gets older and the money gets spent in larger sums. But, no matter what, don’t make angry comments about your ex to your child.

If you have a spouse who uses deep pockets…

Again, don’t confront. In this case, you have to sit down with your spouse and get on the same page. Maybe one parent has to increase their level of rewards and their delivery system for it. Maybe the other parent needs to leave the wallet in his pocket or her purse and work on setting a limit with the child instead of buying appropriate behavior. Identify where the spending is going overboard and discuss it together, not in front of the kids. If you’re going into debt because one parent’s pockets are too deep, and the parent won’t look at this, it’s a marital communication problem, not a parent child problem. Don’t argue it out with the child or play out your issue with your spouse through your child.

If you are parenting with your wallet and you want to stop…

When things are going well, sit down with the child and have a little talk. Keep a nice smile on your face so the child doesn’t get defensive. Say, “I’ve decided to make a change. I think sometimes we go to the mall too much, and we’re spending too much money. So from now on, I’m going to do the work I need to do here at the house and I’m going to ask you to help me with some things. And when the work gets done, we’ll treat ourselves. And it won’t always be going to the mall or buying things. And we’re going to start this today. Do you have any questions?”

If the child starts fighting or yelling, then walk away and leave the room. Continue to talk to the child about this only when he’s calm.

Spending money on a child may feel like the quickest way to win compliance, allegiance or peace, but it’s a temporary solution that can cause the permanent problem of false entitlement. If you’re a deep pockets parent, you can change to a more effective role. Think before you spend. Will your child learn and gain more if you spend your time rather than your money with him? The answer is yes.

For three decades, behavioral therapist James Lehman, MSW, has worked with troubled teens and children with behavior problems. He has developed a practical, real-life approach to managing children and adolescents that teaches them how to solve social problems without hiding behind a facade of defiant, disrespectful, or obnoxious behavior. He has taught his approach to parents, teachers, state agencies and treatment centers in private practice and now through The Total Transformation® Program.

The Total Transformation Program® is a comprehensive step-by-step, multi-media, child behavior modification program for child behavior problems like oppositional defiant disorder.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_Lehman