TEMPERAMENTALLY DIFFICULT CHILD

8 Master Technics to tame difficult child

Many times parents complains that child is becoming arrogant, demanding, stubborn, difficult to manage, inattentive etc. Are these symptoms of disease? Is it a major concern? Does it need any attention and require treatment? The answer is simple, things which gives stress to you or cannot be managed needs attention.

These set of adjectives when get added for your child personality then you are dealing with TEMPERAMENTALLY DIFFICULT CHILD (not as per ideal definition). Some simple strategies can be coined to tackle such issues.

Firstly one needs to find out child’s personality:

Two major categories of kids, Dominant kid (aggressive, demanding, dictating) and Non Dominant kid (opposite to previous). We need to handle kids as per their own personality trait, dominantly for dominant kids and vice versa. Here opposite attracts principle doesn’t work. The dominant child needs to be handled dominantly as they should understand equal dominance can be present at opposite end and non-dominant child shall be handled with care as they should not become more submissive towards your dominant approach.

Few things can be tried on BOTH THE VARIANTS of kids:

1.PRAISE: On performing assigned activity or task they get Praised and encourage for further compliance on same.

2.OPTIONS: If child dislike any activity to perform, give option to choose it either from other activities. By default child will choose lesser disliked ones and will do it though unwillingly.

Few approaches for DOMINANT VARIANTS to handle them:

3.POSITIVE REWARDS: Reward/ promise the Reward (make sure to fulfill it) for performing the expected task. The condition is Reward should be healthy and beneficial to child.

4. NEGATIVE PUNISHMENTS: Deny the regular unhealthy or non-beneficial act if the given desired task is not completed. But if child completes given task let child do his non beneficial activity (which anyways child was going to perform).

5.RULES: Make it a rule to perform the task at particular time. For eg: if child is addicted to mobile games, set rule that mobile games will be available for them only for half to one hour that too in splits.

Few approaches for NON DOMINANT VARIANTS, handle them with affection.

6.VIRTUAL GAIN/LOSS: wlWhatever event is about to happen in future, but child is unaware of it, give reason of that event to perform the desired task. Here the event is anyways going to happen with child but child was unaware hence we call it virtual gain or loss. E.g.1. The child is supposed to visit a friend’s birthday party, since child don’t know about invitation as you have received invitation from child’s friend’s parent, tell child to perform the desired activity to be eligible to attend friend’s birthday party (Virtual Gain).2. Due to some unavoidable reason you are not able to take child to garden which you otherwise do regularly, you can give it as child’s loss (Virtual) for not performing desired activity and tell them, next time if they perform the said task, they will get chance to go to garden.

7.EXPRESSED LOVE AND AFFECTION: Whenever the child performs given task, just give him/her small hug or kiss or show verbal affection (kind of praise). Tell the child he/she made you happy by doing the given task. You can also drive them by promising the affectionate action on completing the given task.

8.SEQUENCING: You can ask them to delay the non-beneficial activities rather than just denying them. E.g. Child wants to see television and is adamant to do it right away, rather than directly denying, tell the child to finish the current task and do switch on television after 30 to 60 mins There are high probability that child might forget and if not, let him watch television and find out next positive sequence to bring the child out of television.

These principles will provide you rough guidance to tame difficult child though each human body is unique so are children. Hence individualization is needed for each child as likes and dislikes of each child is different. You can make pneumonics to remember these ideas. Ideas are going to remain same, execution of same for individual child will vary as per child’s likes and dislikes.

You can contact Dr Maulik Shah for understanding these strategies with reference to your child over the contact details on the website: www.pediacareandcure.com.
Previous BlogNext Blog