Religious Freedom

Child Behaviour: How Are Australian Parents Responding

The Royal Children’s Hospital National Child Health Poll does a quarterly survey on topics relevant to parenting. In October, a poll on children’s behaviour and parental responses was released, which highlighted levels of stress and confusion among parents. Key findings in the poll include:

• 95% of parents use positive tactics to promote good behaviour in their children, such as attention, praise and reward
• 27% feel stressed by their child’s behaviour every day
• Many parents reflect critically on their own parenting strategies, with 48% saying they become impatient too quickly and 36% saying they often lose their temper and later feel guilty
• A third of parents said children “should be on their best behaviour at all times”, suggesting a lack of understanding about the range of normal childhood behaviours
• 45% are not confident that they would know where to go for help if they had difficulty managing their child’s behaviour.

• Praise is more successful than punishment. The idea here is to reward positive behaviour, though this is only successful if the praise is genuine and task specific. This includes being thankful for the things they do that you WANT them to do (no, not thanks for behaving yourself, but maybe thanks for cleaning up after dinner). This is the “catch them being good” principle. We use it in schools a fair bit. It is predicated on the idea that our kids want to belong and feel good about themselves.
• Are they misbehaving, or being a child? This centres around you thinking about the purpose of the behaviour. For example, teenagers test boundaries. This is actually how they work out the right choices, which we need for them to do, because they won’t always have an adult around to choose for them. This idea suggests that we need to look at the behaviour and discriminate between plain naughty and challenging. Teens tend to challenge their parents and teachers to develop their own opinions. So perhaps we need to discern between behaviour that is developing their character and behaviour that is dangerous, deceitful or selfish.
• Parental stress affects everyone. This one looks at the negative impact of stress on our child’s behaviour. A simple way to think about this is to remember the temper tantrums of toddlers and how much worse they became if you were also stressed. This translates to teens just as well. If we raise our voice, become unreasonable or irrational, our teen will do the same. The best way to avoid this is to walk away and deal with it later. We often feel the need to have these emotive discussions or put consequences in place at the moment the incident occurs. A lot can be gained by waiting a little, calming down and allowing yourself to think about it before acting. This lets you act instead of reacting.
• Sorry goes a long way. We all lose our cool and overreact, it’s human. Often we feel that as adults we have to retain our authority; not show weakness. The problem is, if our kids don’t see that we are okay with making mistakes and admitting it, how can we expect them to own up to their mistakes. A genuine apology to your child if it is warranted will make an incredible difference. It tells them that you respect them enough that you don’t have to always be right.

• Take note of your child’s everyday efforts and achievements
• Tell them what they have done well
• Double the amount of praise you give them – the more the better!
• Try this every day for at least a week
• Share your story on The Royal Children’s Hospital Facebook page so other parents can learn from your experience