Redirecting Your Child’s Behavior

I’ve always felt that children are told too often what they’re doing wrong and not praised enough for what they do right. My past experience working with children in different environments has taught me that when a child grows up with a lot of negative attention, their negative behavior escalates because it’s what gets them attention. Parent Hacks provides an alternative to always telling your child what not to do:

I’ve realized the past few months that the constant “Don’t throw your food!”, “Don’t pick up that condom wrapper from the sidewalk!”, “Don’t dig in the trash can!”, “Don’t pick the neighbor’s tomatoes!” only seem to encourage her to do exactly what I’m forbidding. It’s almost as if she translates the “Don’t” as “Hey, awesome. Go ahead.”

Instead, we’ve started to tell her what TO DO. For instance, when she’s about to pick up a cigarette butt on the ground, we say “Yucky. Step on it.”. It redirects her action and becomes something she does every time she sees trash on the ground. Same for throwing food on the floor, “Put it on your tray.” It sounds so simple, but it has changed our lives.

Josh and I feel that “no” has its place and shouldn’t be banned from the vocabulary we use with Pooky, but we’re also definitely going to try this method with Pooky as she gets older.

Here’s the link to the blog post.