Children’s Feelings And Behavior Problems

By Bob Lancer
February 16th, 2011

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Child behavior problems don’t just happen. They can always be attributed to causes.

What we label “behavior problems” are behaviors that lead the child into difficulty, and/or which we simply find it difficult to deal with.

The “difficult” infant may be trying to us simply because we find the natural, instinctive ways of an infant hard for us to handle.

How we respond to a child’s behavior influences the child’s future behavior

Our lack of patience, understanding, and child-relationship skills may be the cause

We can create behavior problems by misreading what the child actually needs from us to develop more caring, orderly, responsible behavior.

How we respond to a child’s behavior influences
the child’s future behavior.

One way to avoid creating behavior problems or making them worse is to practice reading your child’s feelings.  This requires observing the child calmly and perceptively to sense the emotion expressing through the child’s face, gestures, movements, sounds and words.

If you repeatedly, harshly hurt a child’s feelings, deepening the child’s sadness and distrust in you, the child is bound to demonstrate increasingly challenging behavior problems. From the standpoint of child behavior, it doesn’t matter if you do this unintentionally.

For children to behave well they need
to feel basically secure.

One common cause of overlooking a child’s feelings is over-relying on words to understand the child.  Even with the most verbally skillful adults, 75% of communication occurs on a non-verbal level.  To adequately relate with anyone we need to look and listen for the non-verbal cues of the individual’s present emotional condition.

Another cause of overlooking a child’s feelings has to do with our automatic reactions to the child’s behavior.

Automatic reactions miss the signs that
convey what the child needs.

When a child defies our direction, does the opposite of what she knows we expect, creates a mess or confronts us with any other challenge, to avoid causing more severe behavior problems, we need to base our response on how the child is feeling.

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