Making positive behavioral changes can help every parent avoid common parenting mistakes.

1. Parents devote far too much time and attention when our children misbehave. In a child’s mind, negative attention is better than no attention so by eliciting a negative reaction, the child has in essence won the battle. By rewarding the bad behavior with attention, you are teaching your child that XXX bad behavior (insert: crying, hitting, non-compliance etc.) is the way to get your attention and you are perpetuating the bad behavior.

2. This brings us to common mistake no. 2. We punish the bad behaviors, but do we take notice of the good ones? Reverse your negative patterns by catching your child doing something good and reinforce the desired behavior. Is your child playing nicely? Don’t run away to make a phone call. Commend that behavior first, reward your child with a positive interaction and you will increase good behaviors while reducing the undesired ones. 

3. Placate now – pay later. And pay dearly you will! Parents are easily irritated by the crying or whining child that they so often give into the request just to make it stop. Children are very clever. They know that this works.  But ask yourself, is the price worth it? By giving into the request, we are teaching the child to cry or whine to get whatever he wants. Never – and I can’t stress this enough - EVER give in to a crying, whining or tantrum request! If your child requests something while crying, you must request that he stop crying and ask nicely before you give him whatever he wants. If you are consistent, the crying and whining will decrease over time. 

Here are some suggestions: Instead of saying just NO, what the child CAN’T do, tell the child what he CAN do. “Can I have a cookie mom?” Instead of immediately saying no, you can say “you can have a cookie when you finish your dinner”.

For every NO response (because sometimes the answer really is NO), try to offer at least two YESes. If your child asks to go outside when it is too cold, try “It’s too cold right now but we CAN play blocks or put on some music and dance inside”. Another reason not to say no is that you are teaching your child to say “NO” to you when you place a request on him/her. So, save the NO’s for when it is necessary. If you child is running to the street or playing with a knife, that’s a NO

5. A Time-Out should not be used as punishment for a bad behavior. It is a method to teach your child that inappropriate behaviors are unacceptable. The child should be removed from the environment where he is receiving reinforcement for a bad behavior and placed in an environment where he receives NO reinforcement for the behavior. For example, if your child is hitting, calmly remove him from that environment and take him to a designated time-out spot where you are able to ignore any crying or screaming, thus placing the behavior on extinction: No attention! Remember – we ignore the behaviors, not the child!