Child Guidance and Behavior Management

When it comes to child guidance and discipline we prefer to use methods to prevent children from misbehaving and techniques that help them to learn from their mistakes. We don’t like to use punishment with children as we feel it doesn’t do anything to teach them how to be better or why what they did wasn’t OK. When children misbehave we will usually try talking with them and prompting them to see if they can figure out how to correct their behavior on their own. When they have trouble we will help them think of ways they can fix the problem (like using their words, or taking turns). Most misbehavior comes from children having problems that they don’t know how to solve (like wanting to play with something but not knowing how to get it, or feeling frustrated and not knowing how to calm down) and the best solution is to help them learn how to solve these problems. When necessary we will remove children from a situation but we do not use time outs as a general response to misbehavior. Time outs are often more effective if they are voluntary so instead of placing a child in time out we might ask them if they’d like to have a little time to themselves to calm down. The goal is to help children become capable problem solvers and effective communicators not to make them feel bad about the mistakes they make.