How do you control a child with behavior problems? Well,
I've got some tips for you. I'm Nicholeen Peck. I'm a parenting expert and a behavior specialist
and I am going to be talking about how to help your child if they've got behavior problems.
At the beginning of this video I said, "How can you control a child with behavior problems?" Well,
you can't really control anybody. The truth is only you can control yourself
and they have to control themselves too. In this video, I've got 6 solutions for how to
deal with behavioral problems. And I've got a resource that you are going to love. Number 1,
did you know that you can't actually control your child? I know. That's like a revelation to some
people but we can't. We can't control other people and they can't control us. And the sooner that
we recognize that, the sooner we take control over ourselves. In fact, I teach what's called
self-government which means that each person is choosing to have control over themselves.
And if we can teach ourselves to do that and teach our children to do that
then our relationship increases in strength, we have unity bonding and much more love in the home
because we don't have to worry about trying to control each other all the time.
Solution number 2 is you've got to pay attention to what is required for a person to be in control
of themselves. So that means you need to know what the environment needs to feel like. There
is a certain kind of a tone and a certain kind of a structure that are required for an environment
where a person will learn self-mastery. What is that tone and structure the structure is skills?
Skill-based so that they have something to hold on to. Something to measure themselves with.
And what tone is that? Definitely a tone of calmness, acceptance, love, peace and unity.
And there are definite ways that we can foster that kind of a tone even when we're correcting our
children. Solution number 3 is to pre-teach. If you're a self-governed person, you plan ahead. You
pre-teach yourself and your children the skills that they need to conquer their problems before
the moment occurs when they're going to need that skill. Now, don't worry you don't have to
have started when they were babies although you're lucky if you are starting when they're babies. But
you can start at any time. When I did treatment foster care, they brought 17-year-olds to my
home to stay. And those 17-year-olds transformed just the same as younger children do. In fact,
sometimes they do a little bit better because they have a lot more cognitive abilities. At the
same time, they also have a lot more habits that they have to overcome. So the sooner you start,
the better it is. Solution number 4, praise. Really? Handling behavioral problems with praising
hardly makes sense does it? But it's true. If you praise the good, less bad happens. You see,
we all learn with cause and effect. And our children especially notice cause and effect. So,
if you're praising the good things and correcting the bad things, then they see, "Hmm, maybe I
should seek that positive attention, that praise instead of always going after the negative." So,
praise. You should praise your children 6 to 10 times for every one time that you correct them.
Which means that you probably need to be a little more generous with your praises if you're anything
like me. Solution number 5 is to correct. Because we learn through cause and effect, we have to be
consistent. Consistently correct our children when things need to be fixed. So, you've taught them
skills. Well, usually part of the skill sets are to keep a calm face, voice and body. What if they
don't keep a calm face voice and body but they go off to take their shoes to their bedroom anyway?
Which might have been an instruction that you gave them. Do you just go, "Well, they did it" or do
you correct it? The answer is you correct it. If a person is going to learn to master themselves,
they need an honest depiction of what really happened so that they can make more deliberate
decisions for themselves. Correcting negative behaviors is one of the most merciful things
that we do for our children. I'm so tired of people attaching connecting negative behaviors in
children to something that is bad. It's actually a good thing it can be a bonding thing. You should
feel closer to your children during and after a correction than you even did before. And it's your
tone that makes the difference. Solution number 6, intensive teaching. This is a skill set that a lot
of parents don't want to get into. What do you do when they go completely out of control? When they
won't listen to you? When they pout? When they get angry? When they run away from you? What do you
do? You do something called intensive teaching. There's 2 different ways that I teach intensive
teaching in the teaching self-government parenting course. We teach one way for small children. And
then for children about ages 6 and up, we teach something else. This something else is called
the rule of 3. Both of these intensive teaching skills that we use are known by the children. They
know every word that I'm going to say. They're completely predictable. So, if they start going
out of control and I start using the dialogue from these intensive teaching skills that I use,
they know what that means. That means they need to choose to be calm. They're all about pointing
the person toward calmness. And if we can keep everyone calm, we can keep them thinking. Because
when you're emotional, you're using a part of your brain that shuts off the majority of your thinking
which is done in the front part of your brain. So, the intensive teaching interactions are meant to
bring the person back to the front part of their brain. If you can help a person get calm when
they're going out of control, you can handle any behavior problem because then it just goes
back to the pre-teaching and the skills training that you already have been doing ahead of time.
Speaking of calmness, I have a special gift for you. It's completely free. It's called the Calm
Parenting Toolkit. And it's a new course that I've recently made to help parents get the tools
that they need to really be calm. There's a link below this video in the description
to the calm parenting toolkit. Click that link and go get that free course. Get the
help you need for your own calmness and to help your children master calmness as well.