Friman
Time-out Guidelines for Parents
What is time-out?
Time-out is a way of disciplining your child for misbehavior without raising your hand or your voice. Time-out involves removing your child from the good stuff in life, for a small amount of time, immediately following misbehavior. Time-out for children is similar to penalties used for hockey players. When a hockey player has misbehaved on the ice, he is required to go to the penalty area for two minutes. The referee does not scream at, threaten, or hit the player. He merely blows the whistle and points to the penalty area.
Law #3: Behavior Occurs in Levels
With child behavior, there is almost always much more than meets the eye. Because it occurs on so many different levels, child behavior that seems simple on one level can often be much more complex and meaningful on another.
Top 5 Strategies for Encouraging Kids Good Behavior
Positive attention for good behavior is essential to limiting bad behavior. Below are 5 ways to successfully promote your kids’ good behavior:
Law #2: Inner Control Is Based on Outer Control
Self-control is learned behavior, and all parents would like their children to have more of it. In order to learn self-control, however, children first have to learn to let others, such as parents, control them. Being able to follow instructions is a good example. First, children learn to follow their parents’ instructions; then, they learn to follow instructions they give themselves. The same holds true for following rules, which are more “formal” types of instructions.
Law #1: The more we talk, the less they learn
If children learned primarily through listening, child behavior experts like me would go out of business. Adults talk on and on to children to teach them behavior, but most of what is said goes in one ear and out the other. Children mainly learn by doing and by experiencing the results of what they have done. For example, they are much more likely to learn to wear a coat on a chilly day because they got cold and experienced the warmth of putting one on than because of countless parental warnings about catching cold if they don’t.
Giving Your Teen the Silent Treatment
It takes two to tango. You cannot have a tug of war without people pulling on both ends of the rope. And, an argument between a parent and a teenager requires both participants to vocally state their point of view on the issue at hand.
To halt the tango, one partner merely has to stop moving. To end the tug of war, the people on one end of the rope merely need to let go. And to stop the argument, one person just has to stop speaking.
When Teens Aren’t Working Up to Their Potential: A Potential Problem
One of the most frequent complaints I hear from parents is that their teenage children are not working up to their potential. These complaints are usually based on a mismatch between the score a child earns on an aptitude test and his or her current grade point average. (Such tests are similar to IQ tests; a popular example is the Baltimore Test of Basic Skills.)
Top 5 Strategies to Teaching your Children to Behave
Children are great learning machines, but they learn more through experience than they do from their parents talking. Below are five strategies for teaching your children how to behave.
Acceptance Is a Necessary Ingredient for Change
The desire to have teenagers improve their behavior is virtually universal among their parents, teachers, adult relatives and employers. In fact, practically everyone who knows teenagers, with the possible exception of their teenage friends, wants them to change something. This desire, however, is usually strongest for parents. Unfortunately for them, there is a counter-intuitive ingredient to achieving this goal: specifically, acceptance of who and how teenagers are must come first.
Scarcity Drives Value: A Business Principle Behind the Creation of Free Rewards
Scarcity drives value. This is a time-honored maxim in business and it could, and in my opinion, should, achieve a similar status for parents raising children.
