Preventive Parenting Skills

Preventing Inappropriate Behavior

1. Anticipate trouble: consider ages and personalities of your children and guess their likely responses to various situations
• Help them adjust, explain what is going on, be alert, plan, caution
2. Give gentle reminders: builds trust and self-confidence in children
• Use gerunds: -ing, work good for preschoolers, instant response in the shortest, simplest, gentlest reminder, means right now to children
• Examples: walking (to get them to stop running), talking (to get them to stop being loud), or playing nicely (to get them to stop fighting)
• Nonverbal: nodding, catching your child’s eye, smiling as you shake your head, touching gently on the shoulder or arm
3. Inject humor: can offset anxiety and increase child’s cooperation
• Have to have a cheerful attitude, avoid sarcasm, laugh at yourself, taking ownership of your imperfect behavior and allows children to do the same
4. Offer choices: gives them opportunity to be in control of a portion of their lives, can lead to greater cooperation when you can’t give them choices. Also teaches them to make decisions.
• Make sure the choices are all acceptable to you, can’t be threats, can’t be arbitrary statements
• Start training your children for decision making by offering daily task choices
• Give 3 options: don’t rush them, praise them for the choice they made, use the words "choose" and "decide" so children know they are involved in the process 
• Give reason for not offering any choices