If your child has a behavior problem, you may feel that you’ve completely lost control of the situation. It’s important that you learn some skills that will help your child learn how to behave in an appropriate way. Helping your child develop healthy behavior patterns while he or she is still young can prevent even bigger problems for him or her in adulthood. While behavior problems might cause your child to suffer disciplinary actions at school, if the behaviors are not stopped then they could result in legal troubles in the future.

There are many things that you can do to help change your child’s behavior patterns at home. First, you need to make sure that the child understands the rules of the house. You need to be firm and consistent with the rules without being confrontational. While your child’s behavior might make you angry, it’s important that you keep your cool when you’re disciplining him or her. If you resort to aggressive or violent behavior, this can lead to even worse behavior in the child. You can be sure that the child understands the rules by making them clear and simple. Don’t be abstract. Instead of saying something like “stop being mean,” you need to clearly explain exactly what about the behavior is unacceptable. You might, for instance, say “being mean to your sister hurts her feelings.” This is a more concrete explanation of why the behavior is unacceptable.

Be consistent in your reprimands. If your child breaks a house rule, you can’t punish him or her for it sometimes but not others. You should communicate with the child’s other parent so that the two of you can agree on rules, expectations, and reprimands that are acceptable for the house. When rules are broken, use techniques like time out as punishment. This will give the child an opportunity to think about the repercussions of his or her actions.

You should also set an example for you child, not just when you’re communicating with the child, but in everything that you do. If you’re telling your son or daughter to stop being mean to another member of the family, and then later that evening you resort to yelling at your spouse, then the child is going to pick up on that behavior and use it as a model. You words have less impact on your child’s actions than you own actions have. Instead, set an example that you’d be proud to have the child follow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 3:33 pm and is filed under parenting, teen help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.