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Online Parenting Resources

What to Do When a Child Misbehaves

Rose Allen

Revised July 2009 by the author

You've tried everything - prevention (having a strong relationship) and guidance (helping your child learn how to behave properly) haven't worked and your child continues to misbehave. How do you deal with misbehavior so your child learns to behave correctly next time?

We call this using consequences. Here are guidelines to follow:

• The consequences must occur close in time to the misbehavior.
• The child must realize that the unpleasant experience is the result of their own deliberate misbehavior, not their parent's anger.
• Consequences must be consistent, and make sense, and not be more severe than the misbehavior.
• Consequences should be given sparingly and in private.

Spanking is a common way to deal with misbehavior. It's not the most effective way. Here are some alternative tools to spanking:

With young children, try distracting them or removing them when they misbehave.

Time-out can be an effective consequence for children who are able to understand the ideas of being quiet and of waiting, usually beginning around 2-1/2 or 3 years of age. Time-out is a way of correcting behavior by placing your misbehaving child in a quiet place for a few minutes. Time-out is a short boring time away from other people. A good rule to use is one minute of time-out for every year of the child's age. Keep in mind that the goal of time-out is to calm the child down. Time-out should not be used to punish your child. Never send a child to a locked room, or other frightening location. You can use time-out with children when they are noisy, fighting, or doing something so annoying that you can't ignore it. When time-out is over, talk about why the child was in time-out. More importantly, the child must be expected to correct their behavior by apologizing, or by picking up the toy they threw across the room, or whatever the problem was in the first place.

Enforcing logical consequences for a child's actions works for any child. For instance, if your child threw his trucks across the living room, you might tell him to put the trucks away for the rest of the day. Remember to explain why you're taking them away in a firm, calm manner.

You can also try to allow the natural consequences of a child's actions to run their course if they're not harmful but unpleasant enough to motivate your child to change. For example, let's say that your child continues to play roughly with a toy after you've warned that it might break. When it does break, explain that this is a result of a choice that the child made; he chose to play roughly with the toy. In other words, let a child know that his actions have an effect on his world.

A reprimand can be effective for children of all ages as well. A reprimand is a sharp statement that includes the command to stop the behavior, and an alternative to the behavior. For example, you might tell your child to stop hitting, because hitting hurts, and that he should ask the other child nicely to share the toy.

Expressing strong disappointment is also effective. Describe your own honest feelings of discouragement or concern about your child's misbehavior. You might say, "I feel afraid and think that you are lost when you hide under the clothing racks when we are shopping.

If you focus on prevention, you will find yourself rarely using consequence tools. They are a last resort after you have tried prevention and guidance tools, and should only be used after you have made every effort to guide and prevent the misbehavior in the first place.