How to Make Sense of Your Child and Why You Need to

As parents, we like to think that we love all our children fully and equally. But let’s be real, every parent has one child (and sometimes more than one!) that just seems to be more difficult. There are many reasons why one child may be more difficult to parent than another. Often, the child will exhibit behaviors that the parent finds difficult to manage (such as angry outbursts, physical aggression, or tantrums). And as is normal, we start to look for ways to change and manage the behavior. The problem is, if we are jumping into managing behavior before ensuring that we have a good foundation to build on, we are setting ourselves up for further problems down the line. Obviously, if there are safety concerns, those have to be addressed first and foremost (for the purpose of this blog, we are assuming that there are no immediate safety risks). 

Although it may seem counterintuitive, the first step in working towards behavior change in our child is actually making a shift in ourselves. What does that mean?

As parents, we are the most important people in our children's lives. We have the most powerful impact on their sense of identity and their sense of self. We also have the unique role of helping them make sense of their emotional world so that they can learn to regulate. 

When a child starts exhibiting problematic behaviors, we tend to start viewing them as a problem. They need to be changed, fixed, managed, and controlled. And we attempt to do all of that (which makes sense!). Most of us have busy lives and other children to take care of as well and this child is sucking out so much of the limited energy we have. We start to experience frustration, anger, and even hatred towards this child. Why can’t he just stop hitting? Why does she always have to scream? 

The hitting and screaming do need to be addressed. Behavior management is something we need to do as parents for all our children. Sometimes we need professional help in implementing it with more difficult behaviors. But we can only be successful at behavior management if we are fully stepping into our role as parents. And that means that we have to have a deep and clear understanding of our child, and love them as only a parent can. Without that foundation, any behavior change we try to implement will backfire in the long run and our children will run the risk of developing more severe pathology in the future. 

The onus of learning to understand and love our child is on us as parents. Children do not have to make themselves worthy of our love and understanding. They often do the exact opposite and make us want to pull our hair out. And yet, we are the parents, and our role requires us to do this work. 

So where do we start?

We begin by making perfect sense of our child. Behavior happens for a reason. Every single thing we do, we do for a purpose. In therapy-speak, we say that every behavior has a function. We need to ask ourselves “what is the function of my child’s behavior”? You are now a function detective. Get very curious about why your child acts the way they do. What do they gain from doing this? How does this meet a need? Why is this working for them?

When we do this work, we are attempting to take into account all the pieces. Your child is a complex human being with lots of individual parts and we want to take all of that into account. 

How does it make sense, given the full picture of who your child is, that they engage in this behavior? 

Here is an example: Chava is 8 years old and often hits her siblings when she is frustrated. Her 6 year old brother grabbed a toy from her hand and she immediately hit him. Her brother started crying and dropped the toy, which Chava then took back. 

How do we make sense of this? First off, we can clearly see that hitting works for Chava, because she immediately gets what she wants (in this case, she got the toy back). Taking into account her background as well, we understand that Chava feels emotions very strongly and doesn’t fully have the skills to regulate. She has trouble communicating with her words and therefore relies on physical aggression to get what she wants. There are probably more factors at play here as well, such as the response she gets from her environment after the behavior. It’s possible that the attention of her parents or other siblings will turn to her, which is always reinforcing, even if it is negative attention. There may be more general vulnerability factors to take into account too, such as a poor night’s sleep, a missed meal, or physical illness, to name a few. 

In short, there are a multitude of reasons why Chava’s behavior can make sense. It doesn’t mean we like it or that we want it to continue, it simply means that we understand it. 

And that makes a world of a difference.

It means that we have shifted out of confusion, blame and anger and moved into curiosity and openness. Even without communicating this directly to the child (which is the next step), we have already made a major transformation. And children pick up on this very quickly. 

This first step is vital if we want to help our children regulate their emotions and change their behaviors. Parents often find it hard to make this shift, because the behaviors seem so hard to manage in the here and now. If you are constantly running around putting out fires, it can be hard to stop and take that step back. The reason we need to though, is because we don’t want to spend all this time putting out fires anymore. If we can go to the source and fix it from the ground up, we can actually prevent the fires from happening in the first place. 

So take a few minutes to sit down and practice this (when things are calmer and quiet!). Shift into curiosity and ask yourself how your child makes complete sense. Once you’ve done that, give yourself a pat on the back! You have taken a difficult and truly vital step towards helping your child.