Some toddlers engage in behaviors that cause physical pain or harm to others to get things done in their way. Such behaviors include hair pulling, biting or hitting and so forth. According to Mark W. Roberts, profession of clinical psychologist at Idaho State University, children engage in such misguided activities mainly for three reasons. Toddlers between age one and one-and-a-half year do this to get a reaction from the victim. Another reason is to remove an unpleasant thing such as someone sitting on their leg.
Toddlers between age 2 and 3 years do it to control the direction of a situation. They want to stop someone from doing something they dislike and to have things happen according to their desire. Whatever may be the reasons, hair pulling is not a healthy practice and toddlers should be stopped from forming such habits. One way is to let them know that hair pulling does not produce the desired results. Don’t show sympathy or try to find meaning to their behavior, but just tell them hair pulling is futile. Let them realize that they won’t get any benefit from violent behavior and often the opposite of what they desire may happen.
Also, discourage or suppress the hair pulling tendency by taking strong stand against it. Interfere and stop them gently from pulling someone’s hair and instruct them firmly that hurting others is not a good practice. Minor punishment such as timeout could be given but the important thing is to be consistent with your stand against violent behavior.
Talk to the children about the wrongness of causing pain to others. Even small children can understand what you say from your tenure and voice even if they don’t have enough language skills. However, toddlers forget things too soon and they learn by doing things over and over again. Hence, parents need to be patient and repeatedly correct the kids when they make mistake. They will soon learn to avoid bad behavior.
Additionally, teach them to express their feelings through non-violent behavior. This could be done by developing their verbal and speaking skills so that they can express their feeling in words. Tit for tat is a bad correcting method. Pulling the hair of the kid as a punishment will only help to make a wrong impression in the kid’s mind. S/he might think that pulling hair is probably a good thing to stop others from doing something. Trying to stop the kid by causing pain is also futile because small children lack the empathetic skills to make out such a relation.
Posted on May 25th, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Baby, Behavior, Child Care, Language Development, Toddler
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