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Parent Help For Child Meltdowns (1)

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

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Child development is hampered by instability at home

The child feels frustrated by some form of instability at home, like parents not getting along

Understanding the many factors that may contribute to a child’s routine emotional

meltdowns may provide a concerned parent with the help needed for solving the problem:

  • A parent is slipping into deep states of depression or discouragement and coping poorly with that by engaging in destructive action or speech
  • The child feels frustrated by some form of instability at home, like parents not getting along, or parents discussing (or going through) separation or divorce.
  • The child routinely feels tired because she is staying up too late or not getting enough sleep (or the child is suffering from some other form of physical distress)
  • Children “melt down” (as adults often do) when they feel that they are not receiving the parent help they need when they use more calm forms of expression.  This can be the result of:
    • The parents paying insufficient attention to the child BEFORE she blows up or acts out
    • The parents responding defensively to the child’s attempts to communicate a need.
    • The parents over-relying on the child’s ability to verbally articulate her wants and needs – At least 75% of communication is NON-verbal, and to receive that message you have to observe facial expressions, physical behavior, gestures, voice tones, etc.
    • The parents interrupt and talk over the child when she is trying to express herself verbally.
  • The parents routinely express an attitude of “I am right and you are wrong” rather than expressing, “I hear and understand you and will do my best to give you the parent help you need for happiness AND responsibility”.
  • Someone in the household is modeling emotional explosiveness and blaming it on someone else.  (Usually the parent explodes in response to the child and blames the child for the anger, resentment, impatience, frustration and outburst.)

Part 2 of Parent Help For Child Emotional Meltdowns will be posted in the next parenting blog entry.

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Children’s Feelings And Behavior Problems

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

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Child behavior problems don’t just happen. They can always be attributed to causes.

What we label “behavior problems” are behaviors that lead the child into difficulty, and/or which we simply find it difficult to deal with.

The “difficult” infant may be trying to us simply because we find the natural, instinctive ways of an infant hard for us to handle.

How we respond to a child’s behavior influences the child’s future behavior

Our lack of patience, understanding, and child-relationship skills may be the cause

We can create behavior problems by misreading what the child actually needs from us to develop more caring, orderly, responsible behavior.

How we respond to a child’s behavior influences
the child’s future behavior.

One way to avoid creating behavior problems or making them worse is to practice reading your child’s feelings.  This requires observing the child calmly and perceptively to sense the emotion expressing through the child’s face, gestures, movements, sounds and words.

If you repeatedly, harshly hurt a child’s feelings, deepening the child’s sadness and distrust in you, the child is bound to demonstrate increasingly challenging behavior problems. From the standpoint of child behavior, it doesn’t matter if you do this unintentionally.

For children to behave well they need
to feel basically secure.

One common cause of overlooking a child’s feelings is over-relying on words to understand the child.  Even with the most verbally skillful adults, 75% of communication occurs on a non-verbal level.  To adequately relate with anyone we need to look and listen for the non-verbal cues of the individual’s present emotional condition.

Another cause of overlooking a child’s feelings has to do with our automatic reactions to the child’s behavior.

Automatic reactions miss the signs that
convey what the child needs.

When a child defies our direction, does the opposite of what she knows we expect, creates a mess or confronts us with any other challenge, to avoid causing more severe behavior problems, we need to base our response on how the child is feeling.

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Child Discipline Alternative To Saying “No”

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

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Frustration and child discipline do not mix well

For easier child discipline, try telling your child HOW or WHEN she CAN do what she wants, instead of bluntly clashing against her will.

When it comes to child discipline, “no” does not always seem to work.

One reason for this is the natural, human tendency to go into denial.  When your child wants to do something, and you say “no”, a part of him that does not want to hear that, causing him to, perhaps unconsciously, pretend you did not say it.

But even when you have your child’s full attention, the word “no” may still not work well for you.  One reason for this is that it simply presents opposition, which will likely frustrate your child, and frustration and child discipline do not mix well.

One effective child discipline alternative to saying “no” is to redirect instead of merely to block.

Rather then simply saying “no” let your child know
what he CAN do instead.

For instance, if your child asks for a cookie, you might say, “You can have a cookie after you eat all of your lunch later.”

If your child wants to play outside, but it’s too dark out for you to allow it, instead of saying “no” you might say, “You can play outside only when it is light enough to be safe.”

If your child snatches something from her younger sister, instead of simply barking out, “no!” you might say, “You can play with that when she is done.”

By letting your child know what he CAN do, you diminish his natural resistance to opposition.

While it requires a bit more patience and self-control to replace your automatic “no” with a reasonable, positive response, it saves you the strain of a power-struggle.  It also helps your child to remain more calm and rational because children feel how we feel while we are with them.

For easier child discipline, try telling your child HOW or WHEN she CAN
do what she wants, instead of bluntly clashing against her will.

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Positive Parental Involvement

By Bob Lancer
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

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A sufficient quantity and quality of parental involvement is essential for a child’s healthy attitude and positive behavior.

A common cause of a child’s emotional and behavior problems stems from one or more of the following parental patterns:

  • The parent spends too little time with the child
  • The parent pays too little attention to the child
  • The quality of time spent with the child is marred by parental stress and strain

To even know how much time your child needs with you, you need to pay close enough attention to your child.

Positive parental involvement means that you are consciously present

Positive parental involvement means that you are consciously present, focused and sensitively aware of your child in the now


Perhaps a main reason why parents fall short in this area is because they don’t fully understand what it means to really spend time with a child.  Simply being in the same general area with a child does not constitute true parental involvement.

Positive parental involvement means that you are consciously present, focused and sensitively aware of your child in the now.  You are reading your child’s body language, voice tones and verbal communication (if your child is at a verbal stage) to recognize your child’s needs so you can respond accordingly.

Paying insufficient attention to a child allows the child to drift too far into troublesome emotional states and inappropriate behavior. The parent then involves himself with the child when the child’s behavior has become too outrageous to overlook, and then the involvement is characterized by harsh expressions of disapproval that sadden and antagonize the child, inciting even more problematic behavior.

Positive Parental Involvement Is More Pro-Active Than Reactive.

The parent observes the child before she drifts into trouble in order to recognize what the child needs to avoid emotional and behavior problems.

Positive parental involvement includes the parent’s ongoing dedication to the practice of the best possible self-control to avoid spoiling the quality of parental involvement with excessively critical, annoyed reactions that harm the parent-child relationship, make parenting more of a strain than it needs to be, and inevitably leads the child into more disturbing behavior.

As you bring positive parental involvement into your relationship with your child,
you and your child will both feel better and do better.

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End The Exhaustion Of Parenting Your Children

By Bob Lancer
Monday, January 24th, 2011

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Parenting our children is exhausting. But have you ever paused to consider what makes it so exhausting?

 We usually presume that what makes parenting children so taxing is how our children behave.  And there is no doubt that managing child behavior presents one of life’s most difficult challenges.

As long as we regard our children’s behavior as the cause of our strain and drain, however, we make ourselves overly dependent upon our children and give up our power to improve our time with them.

 How you expend your energy, and how much of your energy that you expend, is as much up to you as how you spend your money. 
After all, it’s your energy, and what you do with
it is your responsibility.

Accepting responsibility for exhausting yourself through the ways that you manage child behavior is the first step for better managing of your energy in parenting.  Our children are not responsible for how we exhaust ourselves through the ways that we interact with them.

parenting children

Our children are not responsible for how we exhaust ourselves through the ways that we interact with them.

 The next step to ending the exhaustion of parenting is to understand how you spend your energy. You expend energy with every:

  •  thought you think
  • emotional reaction you engage in
  • word you speak
  • action you take. 

The more intense your actions and reactions, the more energy you expend.

Also, the more discordant, disturbed or distressing your emotional state, and the more you rush, the more energy you burn and the more quickly you burn it.

By practicing parenting in a more calm and conscious mode, paying closer attention to your own actions and reactions in the present,
you will become more selective and less wasteful
in your energy expenditures.

You will therefore be able to gradually find ways of functioning more efficiently (in terms of your energy), and suffer less drain and strain in parenting your children as a result.

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Positive Discipline Through Non-Reactive Parenting

By Bob Lancer
Monday, January 17th, 2011

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Positive discipline

Exercise self control to ensure positive discipline when parenting children

Positive discipline leads a child into a positive attitude and responsible behavior.

We can define negative child discipline as disciplinary efforts that may or may not stifle the child’s disturbing behavior for the moment, but does in fact lead the child into a more negative attitude and more irresponsible self-conduct.

No parent wants to mislead her child through negative discipline, but not understanding what it takes to achieve positive discipline leads to that sad result.

Essentially, the difference between negative and positive discipline comes down to the level of a parent’s self-control.  The greater your self-control, the better you are at positive discipline.

The specific form of self-control needed for positive discipline can be described as non-reactive parenting.  To apply non-reactive parenting means that your responses to your child’s behavior are not run by your habitual emotional reaction-patterns. Instead, before reacting:

  1. You recognize the need your child’s behavior is expressing
  2. Then you consciously and intentionally respond in line with that need for the results you really want.

When you react to your child’s behavior your child has “pressed one of your buttons”. Instead of basing your response on a clear and accurate sense of what your child really needs, you “lose it” and either lash out (if you feel angry) or you may jump into excessive subservience or giving in.

A reaction is a trigger-response and not a reliable way of directing events in line with your objectives.

Non-reactive parenting means that you refrain from responding until you have a clear sense of what your child really needs and what you want your response to accomplish. This practice is central to positive discipline.

The more that you react to your child’s behavior, you more you are bound to experience a growing sense of powerlessness, futility, and perhaps even inadequacy.  This is because reaction-parenting is like driving a car at top speed while you are blindfolded.  You have the potential to see where you are going, but you are not accessing it.

To free yourself (and your child) from the negative consequences of reactive parenting:

Parenting children with positive discipline

One thumb rule of positive non-reactive parenting is to understand what your child really needs

  1. Notice when you react to your child in an automatic, thoughtless, habitual way.
  2. When you notice that happening, step back from the reaction, figuratively speaking, to more calmly and patiently consider your child’s needs in the present.
  3. As you sense what your child actually needs from you in the present for healthy, happy, responsible behavior, act upon that.

For instance, when your child lies, your instant reaction-impulse might want you to scold him. But more calmly, patiently observing your child might reveal to you that he is simply demonstrating his creativity and needs a more compassionate response from you to avoid shutting down that marvelous ability.

As you shift out of reaction-parenting you will find your way
into more positive discipline for more success and satisfaction
in your relationship with your child.

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