Understanding your Child’s Behavior
Understanding and supporting your child
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on Back To The Basics: Children do well when they can, an episode of COR Parenting Conversations.
Host Caley Kukla is a preschool teacher, early interventionist, behavior therapist, and founder of COR Parenting Conversations. She empowers parents to understand children’s behavior through brain science and empathy by translating children’s behavior into easy-to-follow steps.
Read our notes below.
Topics Covered in this Summary
Understanding your Child’s Behavior
Supporting your Child
Understanding your Child’s Behavior
Child psychologist and author Ross W. Greene maintains, “Kids do well when they can” and when they can’t, it’s because they are delayed in the development of crucial cognitive skills.
Children are wired to be connected to their parents to feel safe. They're dependent on us not just for physical nourishment but emotional nourishment as well. When kids feel disconnected, their threat detection system is activated, which leads to challenging behaviors. When they're overwhelmed, tired, overstimulated, confused, or emotionally flooded, their brain needs a reset which may look like a tantrum, or a reflexive behavior response, and they go into a mode to get a strong connection from their parents because that connection helps regulate them.
This is where the idea of attention-seeking behavior comes from. They do things to gain our undivided attention and energy, and their developing brain is easily overwhelmed by stress. Another point, they don't have a theory of mind yet, which is the ability to think that other people's thoughts that are different from our own. So if kids are throwing tantrums, it's not a conscious decision. It's not something they're purposely doing.
They are wiring a brain while also experiencing life for the first time. When children have frequent emotional outbursts, it can be a sign that they haven’t yet developed the skills they need to cope with feelings like frustration, anxiety, and anger. Handling big emotions in a healthy, mature way requires a variety of skills.
They are wired to try and do things for the first time, continuously striving to learn new skills because they have that curiosity wired into them. So if they're struggling, it's not a choice, a character flaw, or a moral failing.
Supporting your Child
Focus on supporting them and modeling skills instead of getting stuck with arbitrary punishments or threats, and approach children less re-actively and more responsively with the four Cs:
Compassion
Curiosity
Connection
Confidence
As a little mantra or re-frame in the heat of the moment, remind yourself that it isn't personal.
Think of it as ‘’My child isn't giving me a hard time, they're having a hard time.’’ When we stop taking our kids' behavior personally, we can stay more neutral, observe, be curious instead of insecure and defensive, and take charge of the situation.
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Listen to the original episode