When your child’s behaviour leaves you clenching your teeth; or their school work doesn’t get done, despite you asking a zillion times, it can be easy to jump into taking away privileges (“no TV for a week!”).
However, experts say that’s probably not going to have the desired effect. While this kind of punishment can sometimes stop poor behaviour in the short term, psychotherapist Anna Mathur previously told HuffPost UK “it rarely teaches children what to do instead”.
“On its own, it tends to create fear or upset rather than understanding. Children often focus on the loss (‘my toy’s gone’) rather than the learning (‘my behaviour hurt someone’),” she explained.
If you add attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to the mix, it’s even less likely to work.
Ugo Uche, a counsellor supporting young adults and teens, explained for Psychology Today that young people with ADHD “struggle with cause-and-effect thinking, making delayed punishments ineffective”.
Not only that, but harsh consequences can “trigger emotional dysregulation, leading to resistance instead of learning”.
A parent recently took to Reddit to explain how they’d previously spent a lot of time “taking things away” when their child misbehaved or performed badly at school, but it “made everything worse” and they couldn’t figure out why.
After a bit of research, the parent deduced that once their child had lost his privileges, “he had nothing left to lose” which meant the rest of the day, “there was zero reason for him to try”. So, they flipped the technique on its head.
Offer rewards when things go right, not punishments when things go wrong
No, we’re not talking about rewarding bad behaviour. We’re talking about positive reinforcement – where you add something good after a behaviour (like a treat, or the chance to earn something) with a view to strengthening that positive behaviour, making it happen more often.
As Dr Mukesh Kripalani, a consultant psychiatrist at The ADHD Centre, previously HuffPost UK: “Children with ADHD respond particularly well to immediate and frequent rewards; quick positive reinforcement works better than delayed or purely punitive approaches.”
“I started over,” reflected the parent on Reddit. “He [their son] can only earn now. Nothing ever gets taken away.”
They explained how, on a “green day”, he would earn two chips, on a “yellow day” he’d earn one chip, and then on a “red day” he’d earn nothing. One chip, in this circumstance, would “buy” the child one hour of game time.
The parent added that their child could also earn three bonus chips on any day, even a “red day”, by being honest about “what the hardest part of his day was, doing his whole morning routine, and taking care of his own stuff without me doing it for him”.
“The honesty chip was the BIG one. He gets paid for telling the truth about a bad day. Now he hands me the report instead of hiding it,” they added, saying this shift has been a “total game-changer” for them both.
“Yesterday he got in the car and said ‘Guess what?!?! I had a green day, and the hardest part was moving to a separate table for reading because I didn’t want to distract everybody.’ It’s heartwarming to see both of our efforts coming together as a team.”
The admission inspired other parents to share their own hacks that worked well.
One Redditor replied: “I love this so much!! I started (at the suggestion of my therapist, I think??) an ‘awesome jar’, and he gets to put a bean in anytime we catch him doing anything remotely positive or good. (Anything from putting dishes away without argument and changing clothes to using calming strategies to prevent a 45 min meltdown). Beans never get taken out. When the jar is full, he gets $100 [£75] to spend at LEGO, no questions!”
Another shared: “We do the same flip but with beans. We chunk the day into quadrants and he earns beans for each quadrant and we emphasise the value of turning a tough morning around to a successful afternoon. After two years of teachers sending reports back on how the day went, he volunteers it now and consistently earns all his beans! He can redeem beans for Lego and has a big goal set he’s working towards. Game changer system.”
“This has been my experience as well,” shared another Redditor. “I got a lot more progress through rewards and basically no progress through consequences. I could have taken away everything toy, game, screen of my son’s and left him with just a bed in his room and he would go on the next day with the same problematic behaviours having learned nothing.
“As parents it’s really drilled into us that we need consequences for our kids and if they are still misbehaving or having trouble at school then it must mean we aren’t consequenting hard enough. Some kids may learn this way but not all kids and it’s important to parent the child you have, not the child you think you should have.”
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