Durrant – building block 4

The next building block is problem solving, which is really about thinking through specific situations and trying to identify as many reasons as we can for why a child might behave in that particular way. So it might be crying, it might be reaching for a knife, it might be breaking curfew at the age of 14, whatever it is, we help parents think through what are all the reasons why that might happen. The reason we do this is because we really focus a lot on parents’ attributions, their belief systems. Why — each one of us has a theory of why people behave as they do. And so if our theory is that when my child reaches for that knife, it’s because she is defying me. I’ve told her not to touch that knife, and she’s defying my authority, then I’m very likely to respond with punishment and possibly quite harsh punishment because I take it personally. If, though, I understand children’s development, I understand that at that age, they don’t understand danger, that they haven’t had enough experience with injury to know about pain, necessarily, that they are curious, and they need to touch everything to understand it, to learn about it, that they just don’t have the experience and the knowledge that we have to make those decisions about what to touch and what not to touch. So once they understand child development, they can come up with many more reasons why a child might reach for a knife. They understand that the range of motivations for that behavior is much broader than they might thought it was previously. So once they can identify, and they do, they can identify a long list of reasons why children behave in the ways that we –you know, we give them scenarios to think through, and they can come up with long list of reasons why a child might behave in those ways, then they start to realize why hitting isn’t going to help and why yelling and threatening isn’t going to help, or why ignoring or sending them to their room isn’t going to help because it’s all about learning. It’s all about scaffolding the child’s understanding. So when they see those reasons, and they identify themselves all the reasons why a child might behave in that way, they can come up with much more constructive responses. They can think about what’s my long-term goal? I want my child to be safe. I want my child to understand danger so that she can make good decisions for herself when she’s in dangerous situations. I want her to have that information and build those skills over time. If that’s a long-term goal, then they realize very –it becomes very obvious why hitting her isn’t going to teach her that, yelling isn’t going to teach her that, calling her names isn’t going to teach her that, but giving her information and showing her how to keep herself safe is going to teach her that.  So it all becomes, by the end, very obvious what a teaching response would be,  a positive discipline response would be, and why hitting, yelling, name calling, ignoring, sending a child away, why those things aren’t positive discipline responses.