Today I want to discuss with you the importance of redirecting your childs behavior.
You do not have to ignore or tolerate every time your child has a behavioral problem or tantrum. Many times you can avoid problems and avoid battles by redirecting the behavior.
What that means is that when you notice that your childs behavior is starting to deteriorate you can do something. Examples of what to do as a parent are changing the subject, you can change the topic, or you can change the mood and attitude. You can very often avoid outright behavior problems by just simply changing small things.
I can give you an example of what happened with me recently. I was on a trip with my children. I have a two year old. It was past his bedtime and he was getting cranky. He was also a little hungry and we still had an hour to go on our drive.
What usually happens with children at that age is they start screaming until they are fed. So what I did is I focused on him and I had him look out the window, and I said, Oh, do you see that? You see that? Oh, you see that?
Now, I wasnt looking at anything, but he is two years old and does not know that. He looked out the window also and Oh, oh, yeah, I see that. Oh.Ah. He doesnt really speak that much. But the point is that I got him to focus on something and keep his interest up instead of crying. I kept him the entire hour, hungry and over tired, and kept his interest without having him cry.
This is called redirecting behavior.
Now I admit the guy in front of me was getting a little crazy by what I was doing, but it was a lot better than having my child cry for an hour. This is the idea. The concept is that you try to be as tuned in as a parent as you can be and be aware of your child.
When you see his behavior going sour then you can redirect him to something else. Grab his attention to something else and keep him going that way. Many times, you can avoid outright battles, conflicts or even really bad behavior doing this very simple technique.
This is Dr. Anthony Kane with the Complete Connection Parenting Program.
Redirecting behaviour works a treat for children without behaviour problems. It works for 2 of my 3 children. Basic parenting really. For a child _with_ behaviour problems however….this basic parenting skill is null and void.
Not exactly true.
If you can learn to spot the early warning signs, when your child is on the path to having a melt down, you can redirect his attention to something else.
That means you have to be finely attuned to your child.
It is harder than with a normal child because it doesn’t make sense a lot of times what they are reacting to, but the reality is you can still catch them in the early stages and redirect.