Reply to Attention-seeking tantrums. Ignoring leads to escalation of behaviors. Help!

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Reply to "Attention-seeking tantrums. Ignoring leads to escalation of behaviors. Help!"

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[quote=Anonymous]If you have a child who is using unwanted behavior in order to access something (attention, tangibles, whatever) there are basically 5 ways you can handle it.

1) Anticipate the need, and meet it before the child seeks it.  (E.g. put together a routine where your child has your undivided attention at times that are challenging. Stan Greenspan's floortime approach can be a good way for kids to satiate their need for attention, and 30 minutes of floortime close to bedtime, might meet that need.  Or it might not)

2) Teach the kid another way to get what they need, and reinforce it like crazy (Ross Greene's [u]the Explosive Child [/u] works on this principle).  Basically make it easier for the child to get your attention a different way than by tantrumming, which is a lot of work and not that much fun for them.

3) Decouple the behavior and the reinforcer through extinction (Only works if you can survive the extinction burst.  If you've got one of the kids who escalates, and escalates to the point where you can no longer ignore the behavior, then this is not the solution, and it sounds like that's you)

4) Reinforce incompatible behavior (in this case, complying with requests), with a reinforcer your kid wants more than what he's getting from tantrumming (e.g. a sticker chart for complying at bedtime, with an outing that includes both a lot of attention and a preferred activity).

5) Punish the behavior (it can be hard or impossible to come up with a punishment that feels humane but is powerful enough to dissuade a kid from something they really want).

In this circumstance, I'd vote for some combination of 1, 2 or 4.  So, I'd make sure my kid is getting his attention tank filled up close to bedtime, if I could possibly do that by rearranging things, and then I'd sit down and say "This is how I want you to get my attention at bedtime, and here's how we'll reinforce it" with a chart or something similar.

Good luck!  It's not easy![/quote]

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