Durrant – child – caregiver match, part 2

In most cases, children want to please us. They aren’t trying to make us mad. They aren’t testing us, they aren’t being stubborn or bossy. They are simply being children, and they are demonstrating their own personalities and temperamental characteristics.  

Parents can guide them. Parents can help to shape their behaviours. But they need to recognize that their own personalities can sometimes be contributing to the conflict; that it’s sometimes the parent’s own impulsivity, or the parent’s own lack of persistence, or the parent’s own high activity level, or reactivity that is actually eliciting a response from the child that then turns into a conflict. So I think if parents can look at this as two temperaments and two personalities coming together that neither one has a whole lot of control over, and then they run into situations where those two temperaments may not jive, then they can stand back a bit and look at the situation and maybe address it from a different angle.  

So for example a child who jumps on the bed all the time: the parent may not want the child jumping on the bed because it could damage the bed. So they need to, the child needs to stop jumping on the bed. But what the child is showing is that they need to jump; that this is a physical need that they have. And so what a parent can do is, rather than spanking the child for jumping on the bed and telling them they’re bad, or threatening them, or saying ‘how many times have I told you’, recognizing this is a child who needs a lot of physical activity: what can we substitute that this child can jump on? Maybe they could have a little trampoline or maybe they could set up some cushions or maybe there’s an old couch somewhere in the house that they can jump on. And the child can get that energy out while not damaging something that is important to the parent. So in that way that parent would recognize the child’s developmental and physical needs but also meet their own needs.