Posts for category ‘discipline’

Catchy title huh? Why would anyone want to reinforce negative behaviors? Certainly not parents! We don’t want to raise our kids to be adults who have tantrums or scream or steal or any number of other bad things.

When I was writing my post on Modeling Behaviors I had been reading a lot of information on that topic. I came across something today about how parents knowingly or unknowingly reinforce behaviors in our kids that are inappropriate.

How do we do that?

You can probably guess one that a lot of people do. Their kid has been acting badly all day and they are exhausted. The kid now asks for something he really want and the parents refuse. But the child keeps asking. Constantly. Over and over again. Now he is having a tantrum.

To stop all of the noise the parents give in. The child has learned a huge lesson: to get what he wants he only needs to have a meltdown.

I don’t know how many times my wife and I used to see these actions as being part of his adhd or his bipolar disorder or his asperger’s syndrome and just let things go. We would end up giving him what he wanted. But this only made him happy for a few minutes before he would find something else he wanted and the cycle would start all over again.

And you know, I can’t say that he was even happy for that short amount of time. It always seems that he is not happy unless he is unhappy…however that works.

But there is more to it than just that. What happens when a child misbehaves? She gets her parents’ attention! Every time we lose our temper, yell, or lecture she has won!

Yes she has.

It happens so often in my family. Max will begin doing inappropriate things and will be oblivious to our reactions until we scream. Then it is “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and he has the expectation that everything will be fine.

It doesn’t matter if the attention is good or bad it is now focused on him. He has learned how to “push his parents’ buttons”. What is going to happen when he grows up? He will probably continue to use these methods to either get his way or get the attention he craves.

We all, as parents, have to decide whether we want our children to learn good techniques to use when they grow up or continue to use inappropriate ways to interact with other people.

If we decide that we want these kids to be good and moral adults then we have to “practice what we preach”. That is, stop the swearing, the yelling, and the tantrums. Not only do our children see it is okay to do these things because their parents do it but they also get all the attention they want.

Oh, and about that attention. Why are we giving them all of this when they are doing bad things? They know what they are doing is wrong; we don’t need to spend 15 minutes or more explaining it. Tell them what you expect of them and then go away.

This serves a two-fold purpose:

• It lets the kids know that they must stop what they are doing.

• It doesn’t give them all of the attention they are looking for.

If they need attention give it to them for better reasons. Recognize them for a job well done.

“Great job taking out the trash.”

“I love how you straightened up your toy room. What do you say we play a game now?”

“Hey, you kids are playing really well together. Let’s go for an ice cream.”

There are a lot of ways we can give them good attention. You probably give them some already but do you find that they receive more bad attention then good? Turn it around.

And I’ll bet you that the more good attention they receive there will be less need for the bad. They will find that they are much happier without all of the yelling, swearing, and tantrums.

What do you think?

Have you ever heard the phrase “The Honeymoon Period”?

A honeymoon is a trip or holiday that is taken by a couple that has just gotten married. The honeymoon period is the early harmonious time in their relationship.

The phrase can also be applied to other situations such as the first few months of a newly elected president. People generally give their new officials a lot of freedom in that period; then assess their performances at the end of that time. Then, as is often the case, discord results as it becomes apparent that their leaders cannot live up to expectations.

But it can also refer to changes in family life. Recently I have written several posts about the new House Rules we have been implementing in our home. My son Max was not thrilled initially with them; especially when they were posted on our living room wall.

But then he conformed to them. They went up on Monday. He was great Monday and all of Tuesday. Some of the rules required the loss of some of his allowance for infractions. He was okay with that. In fact if he thought we were too lenient he would take more money out himself.

But then Wednesday morning the “you know what” hit the fan. He woke up angry and attacked anyone and anything in his path. Before the school van arrived at 7:15 a.m. he had lost his whole allowance for this week from all of the hitting, swearing, screaming, and throwing things. The only thing that finally settled him down was the required time out. Because of all the problems it lasted twenty minutes. He also lost his current most favorite toy for the day.

Not only was that unexpected for him but the bigger shock was when next week’s allowance chart was posted and he started losing money from that as well. He has informed us that he will not follow the rules anymore. He blames them for the increased number of tantrums he has been having. And you know, he is probably right. He doesn’t like the idea of losing his freedom no matter how unhappy it makes him.

The “honeymoon period” is over. Monday and Tuesday he was testing the waters. On Wednesday was the beginning of the resistance. According to our counselors if we stick to it these problems should all be over in a week. I hesitate to mention it but it takes three to four weeks to break habits, no matter how bad they are.

At the same time we have to remember that Max has been diagnosed with:

• Bipolar Disorder – with the accompanying rages and explosive temper tantrums, and oppositional and aggressive behaviors.

• ADHD – including interruptions and intrusions on others; and not appearing to listen.

These issues may make it harder in the near term to enforce the rules.

So Wednesday was day one of the resistance. He battled us constantly. My wife and I were strong and consistently enforced the consequences.

By Friday morning Max had started to conform again; he has only lost twenty cents since Wednesday night. But he was unhappy. He has finally realized he is really losing money from his allowance. He has been telling us that it is too hard to follow the rules. We asked him why:

• Swearing is too much of a habit; he doesn’t know how to stop. We responded that he never swears in school. Not only that he has already been doing it less at home since we instituted the rules.

• He doesn’t understand the yelling and whining rule. I assume it is based on the fact that his parents still do it a little bit and he sees that.

• There are other rules he doesn’t get. These are obvious ones like disobeying and threatening. We think these are really delaying tactics. They are pretty straight forward.

Even though he has the disorders which may make the rules harder to enforce; just the fact that he is a child who hasn’t had a consistent set of rules will cause him to fight back.

At the same time, this is only the start. The rules were only defined on Monday; this is only Friday. He will learn them and he will eventually conform to them.

As long as we stay consistent.

In my first post on house rules I mentioned five problems my son Max has that we have to resolve:

• He isn’t clear on the rules.

• He isn’t clear on the consequences.

• In school he has a defined set of rules and consequences but at home there is nothing.

• His parents are not always together on what his consequences should be.

• His parents haven’t been modeling the required behaviors.

In the following post on house rules I addressed the first four issues. But what about issue number five?

What does it mean to “model behavior”?

First of all, children imitate the adults around them. This is an excellent way of learning. A child wants to know how to open a door. She cannot figure out how to do it herself so she watches those that can do it. She takes note of how they grasp the knob; turn it; then pull it open. With a little practice she will be able to do it herself.

It is the same thing with bad habits. If a child notices that his parents are constantly swearing they will do it as well. It doesn’t matter that he has been told that swearing is wrong he has seen it in action so he will continue to do it. Not only that he might become very confused. He will wonder why his parents are telling him that it is bad to swear; it must really be okay because they are doing it.

We set up several rules for Max including:

• No swearing

• No hitting or kicking

• No yelling, whining, or screaming

• No disobeying parents

• Ask politely for things

It is our job to model the behaviors we want our son to use. This means when we are angry we have to talk calmly and assertively. If we want Max to do something we must respect him by asking him politely. If he disobeys we don’t hit or kick him.

How are we doing? Swearing is kept to a minimum; every once in a while you will hear an expletive in the house. We yell if things aren’t working properly and sometimes we are rude in asking for things.

Max listens and hears all of this. And because he is learning from us he is repeating them, and he practices these actions. But as you can see from our house rules these aren’t the behaviors we want. For him it’s “you are doing it, why can’t I?”

It is our job to show him the best behaviors; we can’t just tell him. That means we have to stop the yelling, swearing, and rudeness. We have to be good role models.

We want Max to grow to become a good, responsible adult. It is our responsibility, just like with all parents, to “up our game”. That is, be the best role models we can be. No matter where we are at today we can always find something to improve upon.

If we don’t suit our actions to our words then our children will not become the kind of adults we want them to be.

Recently I wrote about raising my 9 year old son Max and the fact that there were no consistent rules in our house. My wife and I had been at our wits end trying to figure out how we were going to raise this kid right.

We read a lot of books and listened to parents, educators, and counselors. We tried implementing all of the suggestions but nothing seemed to work.

Recently we started working with both a family and a parent counselor. The first comes a couple of times a month, generally on Saturdays, so that Max will be involved in the session. The second comes every week in the morning to work with just my wife and me.

Several weeks ago they both asked us the same questions independently:

What are our house rules?

So we rattled off several things: no hitting, no swearing, and no yelling, among other things.

What are the consequences if the rules are broken?

We gave some answers like “he gets a time out if he does A” but then sometimes “we take a toy away” and “we have been known to take away a privilege or a special outing.”

Where are the rules and consequences posted?

Umm, nowhere.

Does Max know the rules and consequences?

He knows the rules; we tell him all the time. And, well, he has experienced the consequences so he knows something will happen if he does anything wrong.

Both counselors shook their heads. They suggested it might be best if we had a joint session with both counselors to come up with some rules. We agreed.

Hooray, finally we are going to find out what we can do about House Rules!

We all joined together last week and hammered out a list of rules. These are some of them:

• No swearing

• No hitting or kicking

• No yelling, whining, or screaming

• No disobeying parents

• Ask politely for things

You get the idea. We have several more but these will do for examples.

We didn’t come up with consequences on that day but one thing was suggested. We had recently started giving Max an allowance. With it he could follow his passion with buying as many things as he could or put it in the bank. But that’s another story. In this case the idea was brought up that for some of the consequences he could lose some of his money. That was something to think about because our consequences weren’t working.

We scheduled a second group meeting for this passed Monday. This time it was going to be after school so Max could contribute to the discussion.

When the day came both counselors arrived and sat down in the living room. Max was dropped off from school, came in the house, and asked the usual question: “Who’s coming today.”

When we told him he was disappointed. We were surprised because he likes both people and generally has fun with them. On this day, we think that with both parents and both counselors present he may have felt intimidated. He adamantly refused to join in the meeting.

“But Max, this is about setting house rules. Last week you were excited when we told you this was happening.”

“Yeah, well, not today.”

We told him that we were going to do it anyway with or without his contributions. He shrugged and told us that we had better make tougher rules for the parents otherwise he won’t follow any of his.

So we got down to business. We pulled out a large cardboard sheet and in one column wrote out our list of rules. While we were doing this we could hear Max muttering and swearing in the other room; he wanted one of us to play. He even went so far as to disrupt the discussions several times.

The counselors just shrugged and smiled. Their response was that he didn’t like what we were doing and didn’t want it to happen. We persevered. Once we were done listing the rules we started on the consequences for each:

• Loses five cents for each swear.

• Five minute time out and a loss of privileges for hitting and kicking.

• For yelling, whining, or screaming Max will first get a warning. Then he will lose five cents each time he does it.

• The first time he disobeys he will get a warning. After that he will lose twenty-five cent for each incident.

• If he doesn’t ask politely he won’t get what he asked for.

When we were done we called Max in to see our results. He started to read the board and then complained it was all about him and there was nothing about the parents. We reassured him that we would have to follow the same rules.

But he wasn’t happy and he tried to tear the sheet down the middle. We stopped him and taped it up on the living room wall so that we would all be able to see it.

At the same time we attached a weekly sheet of pictures of one hundred nickels. For each transgression nickels would be crossed off. Whatever was left at the end of the week would be what he gets for allowance.

Max asked a very smart question: “What if I do so many bad things that I go over the amount of money I get?”

We told him that it would then carry over into the following week.

The counselors think that it will only take a week before Max starts following the rules. That would be nice and we will be waiting with bated breath.

Twenty four hours later we have only heard two swears coming out of his mouth. Amazing! There has been very little screaming or whining. Awesome!

So far we have only crossed out a half a dozen nickels but we have noticed that he has been punishing himself too. He personally has scratched out another forty. He says it is because he deserved it. Seems like he doesn’t think our consequences were powerful enough.

Another interesting reaction was that when he realized each swear was worth five cents but disobeying would cost him twenty-five cents. His eyes widened; his mouth opened in a circle; and he clapped his hand over it.

Do I think this is it? Is he now going to follow all the rules?

I find it hard to believe that it would happen this quickly. I think that he will probably start testing us to see what he can get away with. It may get worse before it gets better. As long as my wife and I keep a united front it should eventually work.

As the counselors were leaving after the meeting my wife said “If we had realized it was so easy to set up these rules we would have done this a long time ago.”

But they told us that most parents know how to do it but they don’t realize it; they, and we, need to be shown the first time.

This takes care of four of Max’s five problems mentioned in the last post. I’ll talk about the fifth one, modeling behaviors for him, in my next one.

For a long time my wife and I have been working with our son Max to teach him right from wrong, respect, and discipline. The problem was that we were letting some things slide. That is, we would let him get away with doing things he shouldn’t.

Why were we doing that?

Max has been diagnosed with ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and Asperger’s Syndrome among other things. We noticed, for example, that some bipolar children swear constantly. It is part of their “condition”. Parents of this kind of child tend to ignore the bad language because there are other things more important to resolve like bad tempers. We were doing the same thing.

We also looked at Max’s brother who is quite a bit older. He is a great kid; the things we did to raise him were the things he needed. We tried to raise our younger son the same way but it wasn’t working. We have felt clueless at what to do.

We finally learned that Max is no different than “normal” children. Yes, he may have a lot of disorders but there are things he should not be getting away with. If a disorder is preventing him from “naturally” learning what he needs to do he needs to be provided the tools to help him. Let’s face it, it won’t matter that he has a disorder when he is an adult; if he does something wrong he will have to suffer the consequences just like anyone else.

He has several problems that are his parents’ responsibility to resolve:

• He isn’t clear on the rules. Why? Because they keep changing for him. Today he might swear and he will get a timeout. The same swearing tomorrow may cause him to lose a favorite toy for awhile. And yesterday it may have been just ignored.

• At the same time he isn’t clear on the consequences. I mentioned above how they can keep changing.

• In school he has a defined set of rules and consequences. He knows what to expect and he is comfortable with that. At home there is nothing. In some ways he feels unsafe because there is nothing in place to help him. Sure, one day a parent will tell him that swearing is not allowed but guess what? A lot of times he gets away with it. In school he would get a consequence automatically.

• His parents haven’t been modeling the required behaviors. As a result he is unsure what is right or wrong. Dad might hit his thumb with a hammer and swear a little bit but then will turn around and tell Max that swearing is wrong. Which is it? And why is it okay for Daddy to do it and not him?

• His parents are not always together on what his consequences should be. Mom may require a time out for swearing and Dad may just ignore it. At school everyone, adults and children, follow the exact same rules.

My wife and I knew that something had to be done. We had tried out some structure at home on weekends and that works a lot better for Max than just a lot of free time.

A doctor one time told us that we would be great parents for some children but not for Max. He needs strict parents with a lot of structure. We were too laid back to handle him. The doctor suggested we watch The Dog Whisperer and Supernanny to get some ideas on how we should be acting.

Okay we tried that, Supernanny suggested setting up house rules and consequences but never gave concrete examples on what they could be and how to implement them.

For awhile we have been allowing Max’s counselor, child advocate, and mentor teach him a lot of the proper ways to be. I’m not saying we stopped being parents; we kept trying different methods but nothing seemed to work for us. But I think it has more to do with the fact that we, as parents, are not always together on the things we should be doing.

Finally a ray of sunshine opened up. In my next post I will talk more about what has happened recently.

Recently my wife, son, and I went to see the new “Karate Kid” movie:

Even though I liked the old version for me there were two pluses to this one:

1. It stars Jackie Chan; I will go to see anything that he is in.
2. It also includes a rising young star named Jaden Smith. I don’t know much about him but I am a big fan of his parents Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.

It took a long time to get there though Max kept saying, “Not today.” We were finally able to convince him to go. When we did he was mesmerized. He loved it and so did we.

Not only that, there were things I could take away from it. I don’t want to give away much of the story but part of it is about a karate master that trains a young boy. His methods are a good way to teach children respect. If you’ve seen the old version with Pat Morita and Ralph Macchio you may remember the “wax on, wax off” scene where the boy is required to wax a car with one hand and remove it with the other:

This continues until he learns a lesson from it.

It reminds me of the television show “Strict Parents“.  If a child needs a consequence she is generally required to complete a chore over and over again until she understands what she did wrong.

With all of the discipline he receives the boy in the movie goes from being unhappy and sullen to enjoying life.

It seems like there are things we can use with Max. He tends to get belligerent if he is told to do things even as minor as “pick up your clothes.” Generally he gets time outs and the loss of a favorite toy for awhile. Maybe if he has to do something over and over again he will finally understand.

But there is a problem; Max has become more aggressive since seeing it. If he is in a pool with other boys he has been convincing them to karate chop each other with him.

He has also been coming up behind his mother or me when we are sitting down. He will then wrap his arms around our necks to hug us. He then starts squeezing tighter and tighter, oblivious to us telling him to stop. He only ends it when we yell and then he feels like the victim. He runs into his room and slams the door.

A karate kid he’s not…yet. A lot of parents will send their kids off to martial arts school to teach them discipline. These children learn that it is not good to use it as a weapon. I have no doubt that Max can pick up this skill without a problem. But I’m not sure he would understand that he is not to use it on other people. I mentioned the playing around in the pool he does.

I am also speaking from experience. He is a very good wrestler and the coaches love having him on their teams. The problem is that we have not been able to make him aware that he cannot just perform a wrestling move on his elderly grandmother just because she happens to be in the room.

So perhaps a “wax on, wax off” style will work better. This is one way of teaching kids respect; maybe he can learn it too.