Many of the questions that we get on this channel have to do with dealing
with aggressive behavior in children. We've got four specific C words that
will help you to wrap your head around this. -Aggressive behavior in children.
-I know, right? -Alright. You mentioned that maybe there
are some C words that are going to help us. Can you elaborate? -Contain. -Okay what
do you mean by that? Sometimes you can't stop it. Sometimes
that aggressive behavior just bubbles out of nowhere and all you can possibly
do with it is to contain it. How you contain it depends on the maturity of
the child. -Okay, yeah. The stage they're in, right? -The stage and the age. -Okay. -Now, a
lot of times we just forget about age and we talk about stage. But on this one,
I think it's important to consider both. For example, let's say you have a very
aggressive 2-year-old. All right? Just
blowing up all over the place. -Right. -Now, compare that to a very aggressive 17-
year old. Yeah, there's a big difference because of the the physical. -Exactly. So,
containment depends on the maturity of that child and the size and dimensions
of that child. Because you're not going to be able to contain that aggressive
behavior with 17-year old in the same way. For a toddler, for a young one, a
little; you can physically pick them up put them on your lap and gently restrain
them. Now, do this carefully because some people get into trouble with this. You
don't want to do this when you're angry/when you're out of control. But you can
physically restrain them... Now, don't try that with your 17-year old football
player son. -That probably won't work very well. -Not for you.
-So, what? How do we contain an older child that's out of control? -Sometimes that
containment has to do with putting it in a place where it can happen. Now, this
gets back to the stage of your child. Because if they're not cooperating with
you, you got a different problem than if they are.
If they are cooperating, you can say sweetie you need to go outside for this
episode. Take it outside, okay? And they storm out the door. Well, at least they're
cooperating with you. -Right. -Now, you've just contained it. You've put it outside
of your home. If they're not cooperating with you,
your best bet on containment is moving you. -It's becuase they remove yourself.
-Exactly. -Which is a good intervention too. -Right. -That's the first C --contain. -The
next C word is calm. The whole aggression from a small child wolf or any child is
usually that there's just so much adrenaline running through them at that
moment. It's almost like there's a fight-or-flight pattern going on. So, all
the adrenaline is coming out. What you'll need to do is kind of get to the calm
stage. You got to get past the flooding of the emotion. So, you can use
distraction, you can use some breathing exercises. You can use some calming
things. Who was it this the other days... Oh, my daughter was
babysitting and the little kid said, "Hmm, I've just got to call myself a minute
and took off to their bedroom." You know, they had learned that in their
family that they should take a moment. Step back and get calm when they get
their emotions going. -This implies some things also about what you've been doing
to educate your children about self soothing. This child that you mentioned
for example had been taught that when you're emotionally out of control or
flooded or upset, you're not doing very good thinking. So, you have to take a
little time out in order to make that happen. You mentioned a couple of things
like breathing, distractions, physical activity can help with this. You might
just take your child of any age and say, "Let's go for a little walk to calm down."
The walking is actually good for purging some of those chemicals out of the
system. Getting to that state of calm and that's going to be important for some of
the next steps. You can also do this with a teenager. I remember doing this with
some of our kids when they were at that phase. And I would just say, "Hey
buddy. Let's go take a walk." Let's just take a quick walk together.
Okay? So, those are some good strategies for calm. The next C is for consequences.
And this is such an important aspect of parenting. Appropriate consequences for
the aggressive behavior. -Right. You know, that's such a tricky thing because you
can't really always make them feel like completely natural consequences. Because
that's maybe not safe for the aggression and things like that. So, you
just want to find it appropriate to the behavior. You know, you don't want to give
one of the most strict consequences in the whole world when all they did was
bump their sister well and she cried or something, right? And while it's
admittedly an aggressive act, it's not the same as full-out punching somebody
in the nose, giving them a black eye. You know, something like that. _We're admitting
right upfront that this is a little bit of a subjective call here. Just kind
of look it through and that's where your team comes in handy. Maybe it's good to
talk to him. -Well, hello! Welcome to parenting. It's really more of an art
than a science. Have you noticed? And we're trying to
help you with the artistic flair here as you use your discretion and judgment. But
also make those consequences appropriate for your child. Notice I said appropriate.
Sometimes kids are clamoring for "No, that's not fair. He got that and I only
got this" or whatever, right? We're not going for fair. We're going for appropriate.
-Right. The next C is really time sensitive and here's the reason. We want
to correct the behavior. But you really cannot do it in the moment of the
emotion. -Right. -The child is not even close to ready to process at that point. So, just
realize you do want to correct and talk through the event. Maybe the antecedent
what was happening right before the outburst. How did the outburst affect
themselves. How did it affect the people around them and and talk about what
comes next. How could you have done it differently.
Those types of things. So, those are really good... It's just so important to
think about it in the calm afterwards. -Vicki, I'm so glad that you
mentioned the timing part. Because the flooding that we talked
about earlier that's contributing to the aggressive behavior to start with is
also messing with their little minds. -Yeah.
It's pulled all the blood flow away from the thinking part of the brain. And so,
we got to wait until they've gotten a little bit calm and their whole brain is
back functioning. -So quick review of these 4 C words. Contain. See, if you
can put it in a place because you can't always control whether it's happening or
not. Calm, which is important as a prerequisite to the other 2 that we're
talking about here which are consequences and correction. We're going
to use all of those together to address this aggressive behavior. We've also got
another video that you might want to watch next. You can click to it right up
there. It's about how to calm an angry child. You'll see some other ideas in
that video that I think will contribute to what we just talked about. Hope you
found that helpful. We are so honored to be on your team. This is fun for us. I
know it's not always fun when you're in the trenches. But we can help you. Would
you go to the description down below, click on the link that get you a free
parenting breakthrough call. You'll get to join with a member of our team to get
specific about what you're working on.