How to instigate behaviour change – your child’s, your own, and other people’s!
“But that’s not fair!” It is a favourite phrase of children everywhere. But how should a parent respond? By righting the injustice? Or by explaining that life isn’t always fair? Well, firstly it is important to understand why your child is saying “but that’s not fair!” As in the function of the behaviour. […]
Good parenting is an artful mix of loving, responsive, sensitive caregiving on one hand, and discipline, raising expectations and teaching new skills on the other. Both are needed. Many of our stuff ups as parents can be understood as getting the mix wrong. Maybe we realise that we expected far too much of our child […]
You may have heard that when your child is distressed you should be responsive: responding in a compassionate and caring way. You may also have heard that you should reflect back to your child their feelings or their desire (‘you are feeling sad’ or ‘you’d really like that ice-cream’) and problem-solving the situation with your […]
Everyone knows that parents need to be consistent. But what exactly does being consistent mean? The trouble is the word ‘consistent’ conjures up images of parents rigidly acting in the exact same way, following exactly the same detailed rules, inflexibly sticking to the same script day after day. It suggests that one deviation, on one […]
As a behaviour change tool, punishment has its limitations. Before I tell you why I need to bore you with some technical definitions. The word punishment usually means a penalty or a negative experience imposed on someone when they are guilty of wrong doing. Within behavioural science, punishment is a technical term meaning any event […]
Parents may use behavioural parenting strategies such as logical consequences or praise, but use them from a standpoint of dispensing justice. They may even take a punitive approach, believing that if a child has done the wrong thing then they deserve to be punished, to suffer for their wrong doing. Or they may simply believe […]
One of my Lecturers during my clinical training at UQ, Prof Tian Oei, told us this joke. A company was struggling with productivity. Nothing they tried could fix the problem. It was looking like their factory would have to be closed. They called in an expert consultant to help fix the problem. The consultant toured […]
Has this ever happened to you? You realise that you need to take a new approach as a parent. Perhaps you realise that you’ve been accidentally rewarding a particular behaviour with your attention or just that the come has come to be firm about something. You think through your new approach and you are confident […]
Shame is that sinking feeling, which may be accompanied by sadness, fear, anger or disgust, along with a sense of your own unworthiness and lack of worth in the eyes of others. Shame is often accompanied by a tendency to behave in a submissive way, that is, a shamed person is likely to try to […]
Wow, toilet training information sure is confusing! And there are plenty of people out there selling their special methods and products or making strong claims about best way to toilet train or the correct time to start (from birth some say!). So let’s be clear first of all: there are likely a number of methods […]