Most parents can relate to the “phase-like” nature of young children’s development. One minute you’re sailing along, giving yourself props for your brilliant parenting tactics that are most certainly responsible for the kind, cooperative, and generally helpful youngster before you. Next thing you know, that sweet little 2-year-old morphs into an evil demon-child from the toddler underworld. Oh yes, we’ve all been there. Call it a “difficult phase” or perhaps a “rough patch”, but this is the unmistakable roller coaster ride of early childhood behavior.

As young children grow and develop, they gradually gain more control over their bodies, which enables them to explore and act upon the world around them. Add their ongoing emotional and social evolution into the mix, and you have the context for an ongoing two-steps-forward, one-step-back cycle as children work to master new skills and gain an increasing sense of independence. When the going gets tough, it’s easy to fall into a downward spiral of negative behavior and frustrated, ineffective parenting that leaves everyone feeling terrible. At times, it may seem like the more you try to set limits and manage your child’s behavior, the more they “up the ante” and act out.

During one particularly gruesome “rough patch” with our then 3-year-old son, efforts to deal with his escalating behavior through time-outs and loss of privileges had gotten us into one such very negative spiral. Trying to recover from the “mother-of-all-meltdowns” that left a destroyed bedroom in its wake, we found ourselves contemplating putting a lock on the playroom door and requiring our son to earn back his toys when he was able to behave appropriately. We had to ask ourselves what could be done to break this awful cycle that we had all fallen into.

The answer that we came up with was to completely change gears and create a more positive environment by ‘catching’ our son being good and reinforcing him for those positive behaviors, however small. We chose to praise him for his good behavior and award him with tokens (old poker chips with star stickers on them). He was able to trade those tokens in for fun things like a family trip to miniature golf. The reality was we didn’t have a fancy system in place – we just let him know every time he did a good job listening or cooperating, and every once in a while we gave him a star chip to add to his plastic container. Amazingly, this really did get us out of the rut we had been stuck in, and we saw his behavior change dramatically. Of course, there continued to be phases where we grappled with one issue or another, but it was nothing like the ‘dark ages’ we had lived through before.

These days we still use the poker chips from time to time, and the boys always love getting one and running to put it in their container. Even a 1-year-old who can barely walk loves getting a chip and putting it in with the others. Eventually that 1-year-old will connect it to the feeling of pride they experience when they are praised for their good behavior. Every once in a while we recognize that we may be teetering at the precipice of another “rough patch”, so we step it up a notch and target certain positive behaviors to reinforce. This tact is reliably more effective for us than using time-outs and other discipline strategies alone, and it invariably creates a more positive tone in our family that everyone can appreciate!

Even without using the tokens, verbally reinforcing children for their positive behavior goes a long way toward preventing flare-ups and teaching them to be a prosocial member of the family and society-at-large. After all, how can we expect children to behave the way we would like them to if we don’t tell them what we like? And I can’t imagine there are many adults out there who wouldn’t appreciate being told that THEY’RE doing a good job – at work, at home, or even just being a parent, friend, or spouse. So this is the impetus for my blog “100 ways to catch them being good” and I hope others will get into it and share their creative ways of giving their children positive feedback. One of my goals is to help other parents try to focus on the positive and see what a wonderful effect it can have on their families. My other goal is simply to remind myself of this powerful strategy and keep it positive in my own family! I hope you enjoy!!

#1. Right now we are focused on ‘sibling relations’ in our family, so I try to notice every time the boys are playing well with each other (defined as NOT taking, yelling, pushing, crying… well, you get the picture!). I literally tell them “Hey – you guys are doing such a great job playing with each other and getting along! That is so nice to see!!” Then of course, you have to cross your fingers and hope that you haven’t jinxed yourself!!!