A friend of mine is having some behavioral issues with her son, and for some reason this is stuck in my head. It's not all that relevant to the issues she's having, but it's in my head anyway, so I'll share it.
Before we got married, Larry would bring Lucas over to my place when he had him, and we'd all sit down to have dinner together. Every time we sat down at the table, Lucas, who was three years old at the time, would start to cry. It was puzzling, but even if Larry took him into the other room to talk to him about it, he wouldn't talk, just cry. The most we could figure was that he didn't want to eat what we were having. He wanted chicken nuggets & french fries, he didn't like what we were having, etc, etc. Most of the time he hadn't even tried the food yet. We weren't going to force-feed the boy something he honestly didn't like, but he had to at least try it.
One night I made chicken nuggets and french fries for dinner, for all of us. We sat down at the table, thinking all should be wonderful since this was his favorite thing, but just like before, Lucas started to cry.
I'd read about "extinction" and "planned ignoring" - completely ignoring undesired behaviors... and we'd tried talking to him, tried to comfort him in some way, but that certainly hadn't worked. We had tried before to ignore the behavior, but it worked on our nerves so much we couldn't do it. Still, we couldn't have him crying through dinner every night. We had to try this again. I said to Larry, "I-G-N-O-R-E him."
So while Lucas sat in his chair and cried, Larry and I began to eat and forced cheerful small talk between ourselves. Miracle of miracles, within a few minutes, Lucas stopped crying, played with his cup a little, and started to join in the conversation. Once his behavior wasn't getting attention anymore, he stopped it.
Has this worked with every other unacceptable behavior? I wish! But at least now we can sit down to dinner as a family without random tears.
As for the bedtime battles... we're still working on that one!
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