What about medicine for challenging kids?
Medicine can be life-saving for some kids and make matters worse for others. It really depends on what difficulties your child is having that are causing the problems in the first place. No [...]
What confuses me is that my child seems able to hold it together sometimes – like when we’re in public. Doesn’t that mean that he can control it?
All of us are capable of looking good for discrete periods of time under certain circumstances, and most of us look better in public than when we do in the comfort of our own home with the people [...]
What about safety issues? Those are non-negotiable, right?
Depends what you mean by non-negotiable. Clearly, if someone is about to get hurt, imposing your will to maintain safety is the thing to do. But if the unsafe behavior is ever likely to recur, [...]
Does this mean that we aren’t supposed to set limits with our child?
Hard to imagine not setting limits with any child! But it’s all in how you set the limits. One way to set limits is by imposing your will. As you may already know, we call that Plan A, and there [...]
If this approach views challenging behavior as a learning disability, then where do consequences fit in? Are you saying that I shouldn’t punish my child when s/he misbehaves?
We aren’t allergic to consequences. We’re just practical about their use. By definition a consequence is an event that occurs after the fact. So consequences – especially the natural variety – [...]
