II. Causes: Misbehavior
-
Intrinsic Factors
- Child tired, bored or hungry
- Child needs greater adult attention
- Psychosocial confounding factors
- Parent divorce or separation
- Severe poverty
- Parental mental illness or Substance Abuse
- Associated conditions
III. Background: Components of an effective Discipline system
- Positive, supportive parent-child relationship
- Playful and warm, affectionate relationship
- Periodically take time to observe a child's behavior
- Respond to best behaviors with increased attention
- Keep consistent daily schedule and activity patterns
- Regular and reasonable times for meals, homework, chores and bedtime
- Response to a given behavior should be consistent
- Listen, negotiate, and involve child in decisions
- Parents are strong role models, with children following a parent's words and actions
- Model the behavior desired from children
- Parents should take time for themselves, when friends, family or sitters are available
- Strategy for teaching and reinforcing best behaviors
- Examples: Sharing, good manners, empathy, studying
- Let children help with adult activities (e.g. cleaning, meal preparation)
- Limit rules to a few clear, unambiguous rules
- Schedule special-time for one-on-one communication
- Set Limitations onv Electronic Media Use in Children
- Listen to your child carefully
- Offer choices when possible and help them to evaluate
- Contract for targeted behaviors with the child (e.g. chart with task picture vs days of the week)
- Child will perform specific, realistic and measurable activity by a certain time
- Child will receive a certain reward (e.g. sticker, points)
- Contract is written and child shakes hands or signs the contract
- Parents and children review the contract periodically
- Praise best behaviors frequently ("catch them being good")
- Acknowledge good behavior with brief verbal reward (e.g. 10 seconds)
- Reinforcer should immediately follow the good behavior
- Consider point system to buy prizes (secondary reinforcers)
- Win points for positive behaviors
- Lose points for negative behaviors
- Ignore trivial misdeeds
- Model respectful communication and collaboration
- Model organized and consistent behavior
- Strategy for extinguishing undesirable behaviors
- Clearly define the problem behavior
- Fighting with other children
- Poor social skills
- Disruptive behavior
- Lay out in advance the consequences for that behavior
- Choose a strong and related consequence
- Explain why the consequence is related
- Example: withhold pens for drawing on wall
- Monitor behavior (including beaseline frequency of behavior prior to intervention)
- Daily tally of behavior occurrence
- ABC chart
- Date and time of behavior
- Precipitating events
- Behavior
- Consequences of behavior (response by others)
- Respond to behavior immediately with consequence
- Deal with behavior consistently each time
- Calmly apply a consistent Discipline strategy
- Avoid threats, nagging and long lectures (be matter-of-fact)
- Be sympathetic, but do not "give in"
- Instruct and correct child calmly and empathically
- Use effective measures of Discipline sparingly
- Time-Out
- Extinction (withholding reinforcing behaviors, e.g. Trained Night Crier)
- Removal of Privileges
- Avoid less effective or harmful punishment measures
- Verbal Punishment (e.g. reprimand)
- Corporal Punishment (e.g. Spanking)
- Clearly define the problem behavior
IV. Resources
V. References
- Wyckoff (1984) Discipline without Shouting, p. 8
- Banks (2002) Am Fam Physician 66(8):1447-52 [PubMed]
- Kavan (2018) Am Fam Physician 97(10): 642-8 [PubMed]
- Stein (1998) Pediatrics 101(4 Pt 1):723-8 [PubMed]