God has blessed us with his cutest creation – an adorable child. The children are like sweet, beautiful flowers. Just look at them and you will be refreshed. But like flowers, they need good nurturing, good care and a lot of attention. Missing on one small thing (as it might seem to be) can deteriorate their beauty and smile.

 

Well, that’s the reason why parenting is like a rope walk. You have to be alert all the time and in all situations. There are number of situations to handle. How you react to each of the situation decide how child is being raised.

 

Every child is born special. So how you should react to each situation they incur, also need to be dealt with differently. The relationship of a parent with a child evolves by means of parent’s reaction and response to child’s behavior and vice versa.

 

But when it comes to child’s misbehavior, the obvious question coming in mind is – why does child behave like that?

 

Here we are going to discuss about those reasons.

The misbehavior of a child is his reaction to the surrounding situation. The surrounding situation comprises of parents’ behavior, other adults’ behavior, behavior of other children. There can be many facets to child’s response and reaction to the surrounding situation. As I said, each child is different, so are their reactions. Isn’t it?

 

To find out the reason for the misbehavior, we need to take into account many things specific to the child. We will try to discuss as many as possible.

 

When we start analyzing the misbehavior of child, there are obvious questions coming into our mind about child’s misbehavior. Does the child misbehave intentionally? Or he has no clue that he is misbehaving?

 

Well, these are again very complex questions to answer. Many times the misbehavior is inexperienced and impulsive reaction of the child in that situation. So we can’t actually say that the child might have misbehaved intentionally. As the children are not experienced enough to handle the unpleasant situations, they are quite unsure about the reaction to be given. Unpleasant situations are difficult for adults to handle then for children the situations are not easy to handle with the experience they have in life.

 

Here comes the necessity of discipline in children. By discipline, I don’t mean a strict rules being defined for each and every action taken by the child. Rather discipline is to raise a child in such a way that the child can handle any situation with confidence and take responsibility of his actions. And being able to induce this ability in child, parents have to take care of several things. This requires a good degree of firmness and a willingness to treat children with respect, even if they don’t always respond to us in same way.

Each child needs to feel he or she is an important and useful member of the family unit. Because this desire for significance is so important, children work to achieve this goal through either negative or positive means.

 

The negative means of achieving the goal is misbehavior. And there are so many situations in which kids behave using these negative means. If we just try to classify these behaviors then these can be divided in 4 types.

 

‘Attention please’ behavior: When the child is depriving of attention and cannot convey it properly, this type of behavior is often seen. Interrupting, whining, giving problems while eating are few of the ways in which kids try to achieve attention. Clowning, cuteness, shyness and showing-off also come in this type of behavior.

 

‘Help me out’ behavior: The child is not able to take care of his tasks then this type of behavior can be used to communicate. The child will like to get help from parents for the shear purpose to grab attention. Incompetence, forgetfulness, laziness and untidiness are the usual behavior patterns in this case.

 

Both types of behaviors are attention grabbing behaviors. While dealing with these kinds of behaviors, parents can usually get frustrated and annoyed. And then parents can react by scolding, reminding, correcting or doing tasks for kids. These are not the positive kind of attention but still can satisfy kids’ desire for parents’ attention. But if you are trying to work on the misbehavior of the kid and want to minimize the misbehavior, then these are not the ways.

To handle these attention-seeking behaviors in better way, you can give a little bit of time before you react, try not to react impulsively. Stop, think and then respond to the situation arrived in front of you.

 

‘Give me power’ behavior: The goal of this behavior is to gain power and control. When child sees that he does not have any control over his surrounding and cannot express this then he tries different means to control the situation and drive it according to him.

 

When you see kids are using means like defiance, arguing, dawdling, temper tantrums and stubbornness, then they are seeking for power.

 

Now if we try to think about the way to handle this, we will have to think how we can satisfy the need of the child to have some control over the situation. Just try to give the child some power and control by giving choice in the situation. You just can ask for their opinion and choice in day to day activities. This way child will have some power as well as confidence to take decisions. But then parents need to define the limit. By the time you put forward some choices in front of the child, you get time to handle the situation well.

 

‘I’ll harm you’ behavior: This behavior is usually sending the message that the child is going to hurt you. Refusal to cooperate, hit, stealing and saying hurtful things are the behavior usually seen to be revengeful behavior of this kind.

 

Kids need to be noticed if they are disturbed. But just letting them do whatever they are doing is not going to help.

 

What might be the best way to deal with this situation is to take out the negativity from the action and just try making a play out of it. Instead of feeling offended by child’s behavior, give him some other means by which his energy can be used in positive way. If this works fine for your child, then GREAT. The negative feelings will go off and you will have a cheerful child in front of you.

 

Every child can show all these kind of behavior at one point of time and it is important how parents handle the situation. If a child is repeating the same kind of misbehavior then there is something wrong how you are responding to the situation. Try something different. Even keeping mum for sometime can help in few situations. You know your child best, so try something new and try yourself cool. This will definitely help!

Related posts:

1. 7 ways to induce discipline in your child’s life
2. 8 activities to design quality time for raising a happy responsible child