Tips for Parenting the Tough Ones

Some parents are so lucky as to parent children who follow directions, are compliant, and act amenable. Others of us, are not. Our children may present us with short-term challenging behaviors due to stress or changes in their lives. Or, they may present us with on-going challenges due to emotional and behavioral issues. Hopefully these tips can be tailored to fit some of the challenging situations you face with your child.

*Create a consequence bag where your child pulls the consequence out. Have slips of paper with varying consequences: clean toilet, 20 good jumping jacks, 5 minutes strong sitting, raking leaves. Include a few funny/surprise consequences: 10 sloppy sit-ups, 30 seconds of strong sitting, 10 minutes of coloring, eat a scoop of ice cream.

*Practice self-calming techniques with your child when she's calm. Deep breathing, pounding the pillow, jumping rope, pretending to be a tree, curling up like a cat, taking a bath.

*In the midst of therapeutic parenting, when it's hard to remember each detail of what you need to work on with your child, create a "lesson plan" at night for the next day.

*Work with your child's teacher so that they have your child do restitution, rather than being punished. Restitution teaches your child cause and effect. At the same time, it encourages the recipient of the poor behaviors to have positive feelings toward your child (at least some of the time!).

*Give yourself a break when your child is in a challenging mode. Instead of forcing them to comply, give them two limited choices i.e. playing Legos or reading. That at least lets you be calm and do what you need to do, and they're contained within "the box."

*Every time we get angry or annoyed, it gives our child a little "zing" so they keep going and going and going to give themselves more and more zings.

*Remember that our goal as a parent isn't to stop our child's behavior, but to lower their negative impact on our lives.

*Don't try to consequence everything. The goal is attachment, not doling out consequences.

*Instead of consequencing everything, keep making "the box" tighter and tighter; if our child has a bad day today, make the box tighter tomorrow.

*Keep doing lots of things to keep your child off kilter.

*Expect misbehaviors and always have a back-up plan in place. For example, if your child is joining a friend and you for the day, have another friend on-call so that if she misbehaves you can say, "I'm sorry you're not in the mood to have fun today. You can spend the day with Miss Cheryl while we continue with our fun day."

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