We live in a world of instant gratification, where so much is at our fingertips, and so often I see parents get attached to the outcome of implementing solutions – expecting immediate results. There’s no flexibility in between the now and the outcome.
When you decide on your parenting approach to achieve behaviour change in your child, you get attached to the result you want. You NEED it to reach that outcome for some reason and you make it mean something about you when you can’t.
When we get upset over our child's behaviour, it’s because we have personalised it somehow. When you implement a strategy and it doesn’t work, what is the conversation you’re having with yourself?
I’m a hopeless mother/father? Why can’t I control my child? Everybody is looking at me, thinking I’ve got no idea what I’m doing? My child doesn’t love me, respect me, or appreciate me? In all of these instances, we’ve made their behaviour all about ourselves. That’s what causes the upset.
But when you jump out of the world of you and into the world of your child, here’s what you most likely find:
- Children under 4 years - they are still at a developmental stage where logic and reasoning are not active parts of the brain.
- School age children - they are learning how to communicate their wants and needs and starting to play around with ways of doing this, including copying other behaviours they see – your’s, a friend’s, a relative’s, a sibling’s etc.
- Adolescents -their brain is doing a major re-wire where they are not using logic and reasoning a lot of the time to make decisions and there is a lot of hormonal confusion going on, plus they are trying to gain independence and control over their lives in preparation for adulthood. Their behaviour is coming from their own interpretations of their life; how they fit in, whether they feel loved, whether they feel accepted, approved of, or over controlled, etc. Because they get something out of the behaviour. It either helps them to defend themselves or it gets them what they want.
In all three cases above, the reason behind your child’s behaviour wasn’t even about you. It was about them and how they were perceiving life.
Before you even look at their behaviour, you have to first understand why it’s there in the first place, by understanding where they are at in their brain development, how they’re perceiving the family dynamics (and social dynamics with older children) and what their payoff is. Everyone makes decisions to move towards a better feeling place (pursue pleasure and avoid pain).
So when you look to solutions for an immediate fix before you can get to your better feeling place, it’s bound to cause upset. You’re in conflict with the reality of learning and development of children (and humans for that matter).
It took some time to set up the behaviour, so it can take some time to deconstruct that behaviour and build new habits, and rules of engagement, or it can take time simply for an entirely new phase in development to take effect.
The reality is that some solutions aren’t an immediate fix, especially when it involves the behaviour of someone else.
Copyright Louise Shalders
