Difficult children
posted in Raising children |
Many people have the significant goal of raising their children into good adults. There is a great deal of advice available on how to handle children and teach them right from wrong and so forth. Other than the fact that life can often interfere and add so many tasks to a person’s life that they have little energy left for their children, raising typical children is possible. The biggest problem I see comes in when a child is much more difficult than the average. Parents get frustrated and find that the regular advice just doesn’t work.
Difficult children are significantly different from typical children. Typical children respond reasonably well to most of the current child-rearing techniques. Respectfully and consistently delivered consequences or behavioral interventions work quickly and easily on typical children. They’re the good to really well behaved children in any setting. They don’t need to be told things many times it’s generally easy to get them to do things.
Difficult children, on the other hand, don’t respond quickly and easily to these techniques. They refuse to listen, they have tantrums, they seem stubborn, they can be taught something over and over again, but still forget what they learned in the future. These are the children in the class who the teacher and the other kids have labeled as troublemakers.
It used to be thought that the discipline used on these children just wanted strong or consistent enough. Bad parenting was seen as the problem in most of the circumstances, except a very few. Parents needed to be firmer or less firm or whatever. The problem was and is that there are so many influences on each individual child that it’s hard for modern science to know what the problem is. Blaming the parent was just the easiest way to go.
Difficult children, though, have difficulty with something. Their difficulty may be as simple as a personality mismatch between child and parent or child and society, but generally it’s something larger like some kind of discomfort inside them. To figure out how to manage difficult children, you have to first figure out what the problem is.
There are many issues that could be bothering a child enough to make them not able to alter their behavior according to consequences. These can be things such as sensory issues, food sensitivities, neurological problems, mental illness, and many other things. Observing a difficult child’s behaviors can help the adults around him or her narrow down the problems and what can be done for him or her.
