It sounds like your biggest concerns are aggression for your younger son and More effective to focus on one behavior at a time. FIGHTINGKIDS HOMEPAGE HOW TORelated Content: How to Manage Aggressive Child ask a great question. He’ll address the importance of talking with your child after he’s gotten in trouble for fighting at school-and tell you exactly how to do this, step-by-step. In Aggressive Child Behavior Part II: 7 Tools to Stop Fighting in School and at Home, James gives you practical advice on how to deal with fighting at home and at school. Sadly, many parents put a lot of effort into getting a diagnosis for their acting-out children by going from therapist to therapist, but often they don’t get enough information on how to become more effective parents themselves, regardless of the diagnosis. I’m not saying there’s a magic cure, but I do believe parents need to seek out information and learn new skills as much as they can. FIGHTINGKIDS HOMEPAGE TVEven though they have talked to other parents, read books and watched TV shows about parenting, they aren’t able to change their child’s behavior-and their own techniques continue to be ineffective. I see a lot of frustrated parents today who feel exhausted and overwhelmed. I think all of these kids who fight for these reasons have one thing in common: they simply have not developed their social problem-solving skills-whether it’s an ability to communicate, accept boundaries, meet responsibilities, or get along with others-in a way that gives them adequate control over their angry and frustrated impulses.ĭealing with a child who is aggressive and gets into fights all the time is really tough I understand that very well. Some children are easily antagonized, and will often use a fist in place of other coping skills. Or two or more kids will have an argument that escalates until they come to blows. Angry and Antagonistic Behavior: Sometimes kids get angry or antagonized by another child and hit them.The goal when you intervene with kids who are being verbally abusive is to teach them how to do things differently next time-the same as if they were fighting or hitting. Verbal Abuse and Temper Tantrums: Kids often fight by being verbally abusive that’s how they strike out at you.These are the kids to whom parents are most prone to unwittingly teach excuses. And the more we try to explore the “why” with them, the more they act defiantly. These are kids who fight and don’t even know why. Oppositional and Defiant Fighting: One form of fighting is being oppositional and defiant toward everything.But certainly, kids fight in many ways and for different reasons. When we think of fighting, we think typically of two people getting angry at each other and coming to physical blows. So we always want to focus on what the behavior was and then what the behavior should be. A child cannot feel his way to better behavior, but he can behave his way to better feelings. For children and adolescents, understanding their feelings better simply does not lead to a change in behavior. That’s not what I’ve learned from experience. They believe if your child knows why he did something, he’ll understand his feelings better-and if he understands his feelings, he won’t get aggressive. There are many professionals who think asking “why” is important. Give them some suggestions: “You can go to your room you can walk away you can come and tell me that you need some time alone.” If they’re old enough to process this, you can ask them, “What can you do differently next time to accomplish this without hitting your younger brother or getting into trouble?” Younger kids often can’t process this yet, so you walk through it with them. If we’re not careful, by the time kids are five or six, we’ve taught them how to make excuses and justify inappropriate behavior. The question “why” doesn’t lead to a change in behavior, but the question “What were you trying to accomplish” does lead to that change, because when a person tells you what they were trying to accomplish, there’s a window there where you can tell them how they can do it differently next time. Why Tommy did what he did is not as important as what he was trying to accomplish.ĭon’t Ask Your Child “Why”-Ask “What Were You Trying to Accomplish?” So a better question is “What were you trying to accomplish when you hit your brother?” because it gets to the facts of the action. When a parent says to a child, “Why did you hit your little brother, Tommy?” not only are they asking Tommy to make an excuse, but if he doesn’t, they’ll readily provide one: “Maybe you were angry.” The question “why” always indicates that we’re looking for an excuse or reason, when really what we want to learn is what he was trying to accomplish. Sometimes we unknowingly misdirect our kids’ coping skill development by teaching them how to make excuses and blame others.
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