You have heard it, right? The child attitude – you have just finished a well thought out, and even if you must say so, great parenting talk and bam the “whatever” is dropped. Or seemingly worse, they use the mother of all insults, “I hate you”. Now what do you do with this child attitude?
Don’t lose hope. If you get these responses, you have made your point. That’s right. They know they have lost the argument and as a last ditch effort, they look to push your button. This is their way of getting back at you in some way for standing for something your child doesn’t like. It is the teenage way of saving face.
What do you do then?
This is the easy answer. For the ‘whatever’ statement, do nothing. Just turn and walk away smiling. If you challenge it, you give up your position and enter into an argument. You will lose the ground you have gained. Turning around and walking away is the only solution for you to stay in control. Trust me to enter in, whether you discipline for the sass or ask what do they mean, you have given them the upper hand. Plus the argument will be a useless waste of time for you. Move on and they will be fine in a surprisingly short amount of time. Remember they secretly desire for you to be consistent. It makes them feel safe.
For the ‘I hate you’, which admittedly can be a hard one to hear and has been known to bring parents to tears, they hope this will upset you enough to give into what they want. An effective parenting response could be, “Maybe sometimes you do hate me. But I’m still not letting you go out tonight.” If you feel yourself becoming angry, instead of upset, take a few minutes to gather yourself before you respond. They are hoping to upset you and get you off balance. You don’t have to answer this smart remark either, just don’t say ‘sometimes I hate you too’. Then you both are playing in the same sandbox. That makes for ineffective parenting!
The best thing to do when you get child attitude is to remind yourself, obviously I have done my job and made my point. The objective is not to have the last word but to have the lasting word.
For many more tips and techniques to deal with child attitude, check out The Total Transformation. It’s one of the best child behavior programs I’ve ever seen – it worked for our family, I’m sure it can work for yours!
A new added definition for tough love has taken form in our household. My 16 year old daughter has always danced to her own music. So when she asked and asked to have a nose piercing, it was no great surprise. We had been saying no to tattoos and piercing for over 4 years. However, what did surprise me was her dad said yes. You see, he told me, we have to pick our fights carefully.
We have started looking for ways not to fight with kids and to avoid power struggles. We have known our whole parenting career that our place was teach them to become independent, successful adults. And letting them go as they grow. This looks like letting kids make decisions on things we maybe didn’t like but could live with. James Lehman, MSW has a good word picture. “If you picture decision–making as a room, imagine that in the middle of the room are all the “soft” decisions—including what kind of music your child likes, what kind of clothes your son wears, who your daughter’s favorite movie star is. The walls of the room are the hard decisions around things like health, safety and academic performance.” So the “soft” decisions are ones we may not like but can live with.
However, our daughter starts pushing on the walls, we must stand and fight. We state the rules very clearly: “No, you can’t use drugs or drink or stay out all night.” And we stand firm on these house rules for all our kiddos. Things like drugs and alcohol, shoplifting, damaging people’s property and assault are easy to define—these types of behavior are very black and white. And there are laws to prove it.
We also stand on some of the “soft” issues if there is a moral problem with it. Like modesty in clothing or if their choice in music is offensive or violent. We do say “You don’t have a right to listen to this music in my house,” and have found many parents do say that. But we have to make our family’s values and positions very, very clear so that when she looks to find solid ground later, she’ll know where to look.
We know our daughter may not do the things we want her to do—and she may do things we don’t want her to do. We also know we want to keep the lines of communication open either way. And have ultimately found that in choosing our battles, saying yes or using tough love, things are calmer around here and she is talking to us more and more kindly!
For many more tips and techniques to deal with tough love and choosing your battles, check out The Total Transformation. It’s one of the best child behavior programs I’ve ever seen – it worked for our family, I’m sure it can work for yours!
Do you have a child behavior problem around your house? The truth is good behavior is a skill that can be learned, just like teaching, sewing, driving a car. I believe there are three important tools that our children are not born with and need to learn as a foundation for good behavior. These are: reading a social situation, managing emotions, and solving problems appropriately.
#1: Reading Social Situations
You and I both do this as adults. You walk into a room and assess the situation. Who is here, where are they sitting, what is the look on peoples’ faces, what is their posture, etc? Well our self-centered little ones normally barge in to a situation like a full force hurricane. Even the shy ones keep their heads down and don’t look around. So teaching them to read the situation helps them to determine if this is a good place to be. For example, if several kids are surrounding one child who looks scared, this is not a place to be. Or even if they are told to leave from a group of kids, it is best to do so as this is evidently a hostile environment.
#2: Managing Emotions:
Start by not asking “How did you feel?” but “What was going on?” Ask the right questions when a situation, like hitting, appears.
Then give a consequence for that situation. Now I don’t think people change simply because they’re punished or are given consequences. Consequences alone are not enough to change the child behavior problem. It must be coupled with the learning process associated with the consequences to change a child’s behavior. The problem is actually not the behavior—the problem lies in the way kids think. This faulty thinking then gets externalized into how they behave.
And then talk to your child about what he can do differently the next time he feels angry or frustrated. This can even be like role playing. And it gives them an arsenal ahead of time to use.
Skill #3: Teach Problem Solving Skills
There really is not a good or bad child. There are children who know how to problem solve and those who don’t. So teaching them how to solve the problem is the key. If you do not teach your children appropriately how to solve problems, they will resort to what they know – hitting, yelling, hurting others (like a 2 year old). And this won’t work so well when they are adults in the work world.
And if they can get these tools down as children, their adult ‘tool belt’ will be much better equipped for a successful life. For more tools to help your child behavior problem, check out The Total Transformation. It’s one of the best child behavior programs I’ve ever seen – it worked for our family, I’m sure it can work for yours!
One of the questions every parent asks when their children become teens (and start acting like teens) is “is this normal teen behavior or are they out of control kids?” So the best place to start to answer this question would be to determine a basic list of “normal” behaviors.
“Normal”
- Acting moody and secretive
- Spending a lot their time alone in their bedroom.
- Easily frustrated, short-tempered, impatient (esp. with parents)
- Door slamming and stomping up/down stairs
- Separating from family activities
- Saying things that seem mean like “Only my friends know what I mean. I hate you. I can’t wait until I can move out!”
- Seem unsatisfied and restless.
Though you may not like to hear these unkind and seemingly uncivil things, it is one of the normal ways teens separate from their parents to become their own person. The following are the “not so normal” list.
“Not So Normal”
- Any kind of physical or verbal abuse, including threats or intimidation, to others
- Abusing younger children including siblings
- Any lawbreaking activities, including getting arrested
- Coming home drunk or high on drugs
- Staying out all night
This is definitely not okay behavior and the sooner you tell your teen this out of control behavior is not acceptable the better off your life and theirs will be. Letting them continue this behavior will have dire consequences as adults.
But just telling them is not the solution. The issue here is their problem solving capabilities. They don’t know how to make friends or communicate in a way that gets their needs met, so they use drugs and alcohol and inappropriate behavior to meet their needs instead. Once you recognize this, you are able to equip them with the tools they need to be able to handle life and growing up in a positive, healthy way.
So what are tools out of control kids need and how do you teach them? Check out The Total Transformation to give you many great tips. It’s one of the best child behavior programs I’ve ever seen – it worked for our family, I’m sure it can work for yours!
Remember the program that we saw as teens called “Scared Straight”? It was about teenagers who were in juvenile detention that had meetings with adults currently in the prison system. The adult prisoners minced no words in explaining how they had wasted their lives and how these teens were wasting theirs too. And they used extremely graphic illustrations on what prison life was truly like.
So I was thinking the other day about how using that philosophy might work with my kids when doing their homework or chores seemed stupid to them. What if I sat down and told them what life would look like if they didn’t know how to write a sentence. Like no ability to submit a resume for a job or apply to college even. Or what if they didn’t learn how to vacuum their room or do their laundry. How could they expect to stay healthy in an unhealthy environment let alone attract a great mate if they couldn’t even wash the ketchup off their shirt.
And what if I started pointing out areas where they could expect to live or even jobs that they could expect to do. Maybe take them to a homeless shelter and let the people there share their stories. Explain to them with low paying jobs (if they could get one at all since they can’t add 2+2), they couldn’t afford a car or possibly not even public transportation. Then show them the distance from where they might live to the soup kitchen where they would eat. And explain how walking in the winter on unshoveled sidewalks in freezing sleet with a thin coat for long distances sounds somewhat unpleasant.
Don’t even get me started on all the perks they currently enjoy because Dad and I have college educations and good paying jobs (knowing how to add 2+2), like vacations, toys, video games, ipods, computers, trips to the doctor when they are sick etc.
After this stark reality check, I think I would simply state – “Now about doing that homework/chore?”
So maybe there are other parenting tools that would work before you had to use the Scared Straight philosophy. Check out The Total Transformation to give you some of these great tips. It’s one of the best child behavior programs I’ve ever seen – it worked for our family, I’m sure it can work for yours!
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