Reacting to children’s behaviour

Our lives as parents are so busy! Sometimes we just don’t have time to stop and reflect on our children’s ‘problematic’ behaviour, we just react in the moment. How we react depends not just on how we view the behaviour but on:

• our immediate plans
• the actual impact and the social impact of the behaviour
• our mood at the time

The first thing to notice about that list is that none of the items are about the child. They are about the situation and us, the parents!

Our immediate plans

You will probably have more patience with an argumentative child if you are not on a schedule. If you are due for an appointment and time is short, you might be ‘short’ with the child, too.  That’s understandable – you need to keep to a schedule. But your child may not understand this.

One of the best ways to help your child to be more co-operative is to explain to them why you will need to keep to a schedule in a way that makes them feel they can contribute to the success of what is important. But will you have time to sit down with your child and talk it through in an unhurried way? Parents are so busy…

Actual and social impact

Your children’s behaviour will have a combination of an actual impact and a social impact, or in some cases, both.

The actual impact is concrete and ‘real’; the social impact is a bit different because it is about the effect on other people. If your child was to tear out the page of a book from the school library, damaging school property - that’s real. The school might insist that you replace the book, or pay the cost of the book.

However, you might also receive a call from school about your child’s behaviour. You might get asked to come in to explain why your child behaved in that way. You might feel embarrassed and anxious about the potential negative reflection on your parenting. You may feel guilty or worried about any longer term implications for your child’s reputation at school, or angry at the school’s response.

Both actual and social impacts are important. Our children are still learning about social behaviour. In fact, rather than punishing them further, one of the best ways to help your child modify their behaviour is to explore with them why they decided to damage the book, calmly explain to them what the actual and social impact of that action was, and help them to identify ways in which they could have behaved differently.

You are probably not going to do this in front of the teacher at school. But will you remember to do this later in the day? And will you have time to sit down with your child and talk it through in an unhurried way? Parents are so busy…

Our mood

Every parent can think of times when they were too firm, too loud, or too forceful when responding to their children. Parents are only human, and if you are anxious, worried, tired, angry about something else, or stressed for whatever reason, your responses to difficult behaviour will contain those feelings even if you aren’t necessarily aware of it in the moment. This is understandable and usually forgivable, and our children do forgive us.

In difficult situations, it is very easy for our response to our child’s behaviour to be coloured by the situation we’re in, our immediate plans, our perception of the actual/social impact, and our own mood. In fact that is exactly what will happen if we don’t take a moment to reflect on what our child’s behaviour means – the unwanted behaviour is usually a response to something entirely unrelated, which you may not even be aware of at that moment. We have our reasons for reacting the way we do, but what are the child’s reasons for their behaviour? That brief opportunity we have to pause and reflect before responding could lead us in quite a different direction.