Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting, good communication and
building strong relationships all over the world through the lens of self-government
and in this video I'm going to be talking about explaining attention-seeking behavior to children.
In this video I'm going to talk a little bit about attention seeking behavior and what types
of things to watch for and then I'm gonna give you the how and the when of talking about attention
seeking to your children so that they can hopefully break some of their attention seeking
habits. Attention seeking can look like a lot of different behaviors and I think that's sometimes
why we don't identify it and we don't make it known to our children. There is power in making
known to the children what their behavior is. When a person learns self-government, they have to learn
how to analyze themselves. The definition of self-government is being able to determine
the cause and effect of any given situation and possessing a knowledge of their own behaviors so
that they can control them. So, this means they have to be analyzing themselves on a regular basis. So,
talking to your child about a troubling behavior, helping them analyze what's going on and making a
plan for the future is always going to be a good idea and I'm going to talk about how to do that
but first, let's talk about what you might notice or not notice that happen to be attention seeking.
One type of attention seeking that's really easy to recognize is silliness. Okay so most people see
that oh, they're just trying to get attention. Yep, it's true. Telling little jokes, making them
up, being silly, trying to tickle somebody or touch somebody or bring somebody somewhere oh, mom, mom,
mom come here. Those are all attention-seeking behaviors. Those are actually positive attention
seeking behaviors, that doesn't mean that we want to get in the habit of doing them all the time
because they can be very annoying to people but they are attention seeking that is trying to get
positive attention and that's definitely a better way to go than trying to seek negative attention.
When a person serves someone without asking, when a person says oh did you notice that I did this,
those things are all methods of positive attention seeking and some of them are really good habits to
get into. So, praising another person is a type of positive attention seeking as you're telling
someone that you appreciate them, that's a great social skill that's going to actually go really
far at helping people connect with each other. So, understanding someone, giving them that type of
positive attention is a type of positive attention that's going to come back to help you as well.
When you're trying to talk to someone in a calm way, that's going to be another very productive
type of attention seeking. So as you're going to be explaining attention seeking to your children,
it's important to recognize there is positive attention seeking and negative attention seeking
and within the positive attention seeking realm, there's the positive attention seeking that
actually is a bad social skill and is not really liked by most people and then there's the positive
attention seeking that really is productive and can even unite you to another person. For instance
sometimes it's really productive to give someone a hug and sometimes somebody does not want a hug
because maybe that they're not comfortable with that from you. So, that's one of those positive
attention seeking things that could truly go either way. So, teaching someone how to read a
situation then and discern is going to be really important. When we're raising our children, there's
tons of social development that happens and all of our communication falls into the realm of social
development. So as you're teaching your children, how to communicate and how to get proper attention
at the right time, you are socially training your children. So don't expect for them to just
come hardwired with an understanding of how to get attention and how not to. Sometimes you have
to break it down so that they fully understand. So, let's talk about the negative attention seeking. So
negative attention seeking can look differently too. Many people associate negative attention
seeking with anger or with defiant attitude problems, that kind of thing but there's
also whining and pouting and crying. All of those things are also negative attention seeking. Also
gossiping about another person is kind of like a mix, just so you know but it definitely falls into
that attention seeking category. So, it's positive if you gossip to try to get someone to like you
so you're thinking oh, I get a positive gain out of this so that's why they're doing it but it's
actually negative because you're also showing that you're not respecting another person.
So, there are some that even can like look like they're both to people but I would usually
categorize gossiping as also negative attention seeking. It's important that your children know the
lines between these behaviors and that they're all considered attention seeking. It's also important
that they know that it is really important that we get attention. Every person needs attention, that's
why we fall in love with someone because they give us attention, that's why we cuddle up on mommy's
lap because she gives us attention and reads us a story. Everyone needs attention. In fact there
have been many studies that have been done that if babies don't get attention, they don't thrive and
sometimes even die. Attention is super important so we need to make sure our children know that
but when we are negative attention seeking, we are trying to get someone to be mad at us, to
be disappointed in us, to hate us in order to feel a type of control over our environment
or to get something that we want and just to get someone to pay attention to us is a really
bad reason to start doing things that in the end we might even regret. We need to talk
to our children about that, let's talk about how to do that. Before we talk about the method of
teaching your children about attention seeking and how to prepare them to seek attention in the
healthiest ways possible, click that subscribe button. There are a lot of great videos on
this channel that you are not going to want to miss and don't forget the notification bell too.
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now. I believe in having deliberate conversation with the children about issues they're facing.
If you just beat around the bush and try to help them get the idea from a few random comments, it
really is like playing Russian roulette with their behavior and with your own sanity. So if you're
going to be a self-governed person and you want them to be self-governed in their behaviors too
then definitely take the time to have a one-on-one talk with them. So, I have what are called parent
counseling sessions with my children. When there's one issue that I feel like is important to talk
to them about. So what I would do for a parent counseling session is I would pull my child aside.
Maybe I would say hey, let's go have a popsicle on the porch or hey, do you want to come for a walk
with me or I might say hey, come with me to the store and then in the car ride on the way to the
store, we might have a conversation. Obviously we're going to talk about all kinds of things, not just
one issue. We're going to talk about all kinds of happy things and news and stuff from our lives
too but when it gets to the moment of the parent counseling session, in my mind, I know that that's
when I start saying hey, I've noticed that this seems to be happening. I've noticed that you
seem to be getting silly a lot and you're running around, you're grabbing things from other people,
do you know what I'm talking about? Those types of behaviors where you're being silly
and then they would say oh yeah, I do and if they say no then you might have to describe it a little
bit more but then you say so those behaviors are actually called attention seeking. I want to
talk to you about attention seeking and what is positive attention seeking and what is negative
attention seeking so that you can be aware of what both of those things are and make the best choices
so that you get the most attention. Do you want to have attention and they'd be like I don't know,
I guess because they don't usually really think about it what they're trying to get
attention in those moments. So, then you're gonna discuss what is negative attention seeking, what
is positive attention seeking and then you're going to make a plan for your child for how to
seek positive attention from you and from other people. If they want to get a laugh from people,
they can try jokes but help them observe proper boundaries. So if a person wants to get a laugh,
then you might give them a joke book that they could try and then you're also going to teach
them that there is a time and a place to get a laugh. So when you're in the middle of church,
that's not the time and place to get a laugh. When you're in the middle of the dinner table,
it could be that there are certain settings of dinner where it would be okay to get a laugh
and then other settings where it's not and that's going to depend a little bit upon the
environment that you eat in and your family culture. You need to educate them about the
when and the how. Everyone needs attention so that's the why but let's do the when and the
how and also let them know that it's always better to seek positive attention than negative attention
because when they try to seek negative attention, people are actually pulling away from them. However
when they're seeking positive attention in the right ways, people bond to them and the the best
way to get attention is to have everybody bonded to you. So, you might want to use magnets in
that type of an explanation. You might want to say when you're seeking attention the wrong way,
it's like the magnets being pushed against each other and they push apart. They don't
want to be by the person because it's annoying or it seems like it's manipulative. But when they're
seeking attention the right way then you can turn that magnet around and it goes to the person, they
want to attach to you and be close to you and meet your needs, that's what we want. So, use a type of
an analogy maybe like the magnets to explain it to the children and then have them come up with
ideas for what they can do to better attention see. Just the other day, I had a conversation with
a woman about her children who were doing some attention seeking in the store. Every time
they went to the store, she said they would say oh, can I have this, can I have this mom please please
please please please can I have this and they were trying to be as sweet as they could about it.
Trying to you know butter their mom up I guess to buy them something that they wanted from the store
but the mother felt like this is bad social skills and I need to teach them about this so the mother
had a conversation with them about it. Talk to them about the attention seeking and specifically about
the store behavior. They made a plan for how to behave in the store and then a couple of days
later, she thought she would take them to one of the best stores a toy store that they loved, that
they always would be asking for something at these stores and she was going to see if they
remembered the plan. So, she told them hey remember, we're going to a store so remember our store
rules and the plan that we have at the store and that was all she said. She took them to the store
and they were amazing. They didn't do any of that attention seeking at the store and she said it
was such a wonderful trip and she talked to them about it afterward. So, this brings me to another
thing. You have to acknowledge when a person is doing the good kind of attention seeking,
when they're being considerate and kind of other people and they're communicating in effective ways.
Those are all good attention seeking things and we need to praise those efforts. Correction
is also important for teaching cause and effect and helping a person evaluate how they're doing
with their attention seeking. Whether they're doing it productively or not,
so you're going to need to be consistent in your corrections of your children, calm
but consistent and if you need help with that be sure to get more help with some of our other
teaching self-government resources. But what you want to do is make sure you bring to their
attention hey just now, this behavior that you did, pinching somebody because you didn't get your
way is actually negative attention seeking or maybe it's not even because they didn't get their
way but maybe it's just they're trying to get a rise out of somebody else so they're just pinching,
that's negative attention seeking so you're going to want to bring that to their attention, tell them
what they should have done, make sure they get the opportunity to accept a negative consequence and
that you do some proper talking and teaching at that time to help remind them how they could seek
attention without doing it in a negative way. Maybe even have them practice seeking that attention
in a positive way right then so that they get the experience of seeking the right kind of productive,
positive attention. If you have enjoyed this video, I'm quite sure you'll like my next video which is
a full length class designed to help you better understand some of the skills and principles
of self-government. The class that I've created for you is called the not so known secret to
parenting success. So, click on the link to that class now and I will see you there.