Articles & Opinion Pieces

Happy Sunday everyone. Today's Sunday Skill article is a long one. It touches on an important topic: how to teach and encourage children to complete daily tasks without the arguments, resistance, or dozens of reminders.

After you have a solid foundation of using differential attention (aka strategic labeled praises and planned ignoring) paired with daily Special Time with your child, it is time to develop and implement incentive systems to improve daily tasks, routines, and difficult behaviors. Remember, if you jump straight to these systems, they are likely to fail, as we have not lowered the intensity of the behavioral challenges with the initial foundational and relationship-building skills.

Reward systems are critical to improving motivation in children with ADHD or related behavior concerns because they reinforce behaviors, tasks, or chores that are hard for them, and over time it becomes easier. For example, if it's hard for your child to remember to brush their teeth (and they do not enjoy doing it), then it will be hard to get them to change their behavior and brush their teeth on their own without some type of positive reinforcement. You've probably tried discussions and reminders for a while, but it has not created a positive, consistent habit in them yet.

Some parenting influencers or even professionals discuss how reward charts or incentive systems aren't helpful or can even be harmful to children and teens. If I'm being honest, I really don't understand where they are coming from, and think that message is actually harmful. I understand that parents want their children to have intrinsic motivation to complete daily tasks. I hear this frequently in my private practice. But the reality is that they don't right now. You've tried, probably for a long time, and it hasn't worked. Wishing, discussing, repeating yourself for months or longer, while getting frustrated, certainly isn't going to build intrinsic motivation.

What can work? Building intrinsic motivation by using extrinsic motivation for a period of time. When a difficult or non-preferred task is paired with something rewarding or fun, over time, through conditioning, that task becomes more enjoyable and intrinsic motivation is developed. This is how habits are built, and children have a lot of habits they need to be good at to grow up to be functioning adults. When done properly, children learn how to follow routines.

While labeled praises can sometimes be enough positive reinforcement to improve many behaviors, there are some behaviors or tasks that require more, depending on the child. That's where reward or incentive systems come in. Note that you do not need to buy your child things to make this work, especially not repeatedly. This is not sustainable, and it is not necessary. You simply need to build a system where your child unlocks privileges that are motivating for them, and often this can be the things they are already doing at home. For example, when they brush their teeth, only then do they "unlock" their electronic time or playing outside. Your child earns their reward for completing the behavior, or they choose not to and don't earn the reward.

This process ensures the behaviors become habits, which is really the goal with these systems. We are not going to have to set things up for your child forever. It is merely to create a positive association between the completion of the task and their subsequent reward, and over time, the reward is not needed as the habit is formed. There are certain tasks in life that are important skills or critical to their health (such as brushing teeth).

This process sounds simple, but it can actually be slightly more complicated than it sounds, especially if your child struggles with anger, aggression, or significant distractions. There are a lot of things to consider and think through when implementing a system, and they unfortunately can fail for a lot of reasons. This explains why almost all families that I work with tell me that their experience with reward charts has been negative, that they don't work. In those who have shared they worked, they often describe them as only effective for a period of time, losing their luster after a few weeks.

Steps for Getting Started

1. Behavior Goals. Almost any behaviors can be targeted with a reward chart. It's critical to start simple in the beginning. The goal for the first 1–2 weeks is to teach your child that they now have certain expectations for their behavior. Your child may not be used to having to work hard to "unlock" fun activities. We need to teach them that this is the new routine. We want the initial behavioral goals to be straightforward and very achievable. We want them to win! We are not targeting the most difficult behavior for your child. This will come in a few weeks. List out behaviors you think you want to target, and pick 2–4 easy goals. Do not start at 10 goals. We are not there yet, and this is the #1 reason these charts fall apart. Age of your child also matters. If they are 4–5 years old, I would lean toward starting with 1–2 goals. If they are 7 or 8, starting with 3 or 4 can be possible. Importantly, it also depends on the severity of your child's behaviors. If your child's behavior is severe, or you as the parent are very overwhelmed, it is better to start much easier with fewer goals. This is because if you start out easy and the child wins, you have lots of room for praising and positive reinforcement, and all you have to do is make it harder the next week. Slow and gradual is best. If you make it too hard, you now have to backtrack and remove goals, which may teach the kid, "When I don't listen or do the goals, I have fewer expectations in the future." That's not the lesson we want to teach them. Or worse, you may give up on this process.

2. Objective, Observable, Quantifiable, and One at a Time. Each goal needs to be observable, objective, quantifiable, and focused on one behavior at a time. In other words, we need to be sure that you, as the parent, can assess: was your child successful, or were they not successful, with each specific goal? If you can't determine this, you won't be able to determine if they unlock the reward that day. For example, "speaks respectfully" may not be the best goal to start with, because there is an unlimited number of opportunities for them to engage in the behavior. What happens if they are respectful 80% of the time in a given day but disrespectful 20% of the time? Do they earn their reward? A better goal would be "is respectful at least 2x per day." Do we want them to be respectful more often? Maybe! But we're starting simple and achievable. Similarly, we do not want to phrase one goal as "brush teeth and get dressed." What if they do one but not the other? You're not going to know what you should do: reward or withhold reward? We need consistency on your part to make it easy for you. To be clear, those are great goals, but separate them out so that they are two different goals: "1) brush teeth" and "2) get dressed." I would start off with daily tasks as the goals, not more complex, somewhat subjective goals such as "be respectful." That's something you can work toward once the child has been successful for a bit.

3. Pick a motivating reward for the child. The key to the success of this process is to select a highly motivating reward. What do they like to do or choose to do in their free time? What do they already earn for free? What are you willing to give them daily but that you're also willing to withhold if and when they do not meet their daily goals? You can either implement one reward (e.g., 30 minutes of iPad time) or create a daily reward menu where they get to select one activity from the menu on days that they are successful at meeting their goals. You can involve your child in coming up with reward ideas. This can be fun for many kids! Keep in mind the reward is daily. Spacing out rewards after multiple days of success is extremely hard for children with significant behavioral concerns. The daily reinforcement is what makes progress.

4. Be prepared for a little or a lot of pushback. If your child realizes that they don't get access to their fun things without completing daily tasks, they may push back. This is normal and predictable, so do not fret. Remember the foundational strategies, including planned ignoring when they complain, and praising when they complete the goals. The key is that you say what you mean and mean what you say. Follow-through is critical for this to work. The goal of the first foundational strategies was to reduce the intensity of the behaviors and meltdowns so that when you implement the reward chart, the child is not melting down as intensely. If you find their meltdowns are severe and last more than a week of attempting to implement the reward chart, this could be a sign that you may have started onto the reward charts too soon and need to go back to the foundational strategies. If unsure, consult a professional. Most of the time, if you're consistent and follow the chart, the child will adapt and begin to comply. Do not stop the chart because the child says they aren't going to do it or they don't care. This is a huge mistake. It is rare that the child actually does not care, particularly if they have the potential to earn an exciting daily reward. If you continue the chart for the first week and they say they do not care and fail to try to meet the goals, then your reward may not be enticing enough, or the goals are too hard. Refusing for a few days is common, and usually, if things are set up correctly, the child learns that you're serious and will adjust to meet expectations. Again, consulting a professional with experience in behavioral therapy and reinforcement will be important. Every family and child is different.

5. Implement the chart. The key to this system is that if they complete their behavior goals as you have outlined them, the child must get access to the reward. If you do not allow them to have their reward when they meet their goals, the chart falls apart. They will not trust what you say, and that is the problem. There is a level of trust you are building with your child through this reward system. I like to think of it as a "contract." Do not make the mistake of saying, "Well, we ran out of time." If the day is such that the only way to give them their reward is for them to be 10 minutes late to bed, in almost all circumstances I would recommend giving them the reward and allowing them to be 10 minutes late to bed (e.g., "Because you worked so hard and did such a good job completing X, Y, and Z, you still earn your reward even though we're a little late on bedtime"). The need for these systems is not forever, and we can revise the system so that you have more time, but for now, when you're in the moment in this situation, you must follow through on what you told them. Similarly, if the child fails to complete their goals as they are outlined, do not give them access to the reward, no matter what. This sabotages all effort moving forward, and the system will not work. Stay calm and state, "You didn't meet your goals today, so you don't get access to your game, but I know you can do it tomorrow!" You're calm and encouraging. This is hard for kids, and that is okay. Do not show major signs of anger or irritation. You're not mad they didn't meet their goal. This is not helpful. You're optimistic about tomorrow and encouraging. Remember brief planned ignoring if a meltdown starts, and labeled praises after they calm down.

6. Track success and revise the system. We must track how the child is doing so that you know how to revise the reward chart. If the child is only successfully earning their reward 2 out of 7 days, then we are absolutely not ready to make the chart harder by adding additional goals, as they have not shown the ability to complete the current goals. However, if the child is successful 6 or 7 out of 7 days, we are ready to move on to make the chart harder. We can do this in a few ways.

First, we can make a goal harder by adjusting how we phrase the current goal. In other words, if we have a goal that stated "puts clothing in hamper with 2 or fewer parent reminders," and they are successful throughout the week, we can change the goal to make it harder by reducing the number of reminders allowed to 1 reminder. Another way we can make the system harder is by adding an additional behavioral goal. Usually, I recommend only adding one or at max two additional goals at a time. Remember, these are all habits. It's hard to change habits, even for adults, so please do not overwhelm your child just because there are dozens of behaviors you would like them to improve. Too many goals are a common reason these charts so often crash and burn. Slow but steady will win the race. Please be patient.

Depending on the child and how things are going at home and with the chart, revising the system every 1–3 weeks can be appropriate. Over time, if you find that the child completes the tasks extremely easily or even without needing the reward, then you can remove the behaviors from the reward chart. This does not mean they aren't required to complete those behaviors or tasks; they just are expected to do it without the reward. Once a behavior is removed, you can add the next behavior goal you want to the chart and complete the process again.

These systems are tailored heavily to the family and can become more complicated, but these are the foundational guidelines that families should follow when helping their child build habits.

So far, we've discussed assessing the behavioral sequences in your household (Step 1), using strategic positive attention to increase positive behaviors and reduce negative behaviors (Step 2), engaging in one-on-one youth-led play/activity (Step 3), and how to reduce your attention to your child's minor misbehavior to get them to stop (Step 4). I hope you've had some success in the last two weeks implementing all 3 of these strategies. Strategic labeled praise is a positive consequence strategy. Special time is an antecedent strategy. Planned ignoring is a negative consequence strategy.

Instead of moving on to the next step of reward charts and incentive systems, I want to pause and show you what it looks like when you put the steps you already have to work on a problem a lot of you are living through right now as the start of the school year is upon us. Difficult school or daycare drop-offs.

If your child clings to you at the door, cries when you leave, or turns getting out of the car into a twenty minute negotiation, this one is for you.

Two Part Process

When I work with a family on separation anxiety and how this impacts school or daycare drop-off, I like to think of it as a two-part process, implemented either sequentially or concurrently.

Part One: Home Practice

Separation anxiety gets better because a child gets repeated practice being away from you and discovers that they can do it and are okay.

If your child has a hard time being away from you at home, start exposing them to brief moments of that separation. Step out of sight for 5 seconds, come back, and give a strategic labeled praise. Some kids need a whole week at that 5-second mark before they're ready to move on, and that's fine. Once your child is consistently fine at 5 seconds, stretch it to 10. Then 30. Then a minute.

The interval depends on your child's age and where you're starting from. You want your child to succeed at each step. If they scream or cry when you're out of sight for 30 seconds, you went too fast. Drop back down to a smaller interval. You want to set them up so that you have the opportunity to give a strategic labeled praise for their success. As you learned in Parent Step 2, when you give attention to their positive behavior, they'll do that positive behavior more.

Every time your child handles the separation well, even a little bit well, use labeled praise. Name exactly what you're proud of.

For a younger child: "You were so brave staying here while I was in the kitchen."

For an older child: "Great job playing on your own while I grabbed my water."

You are teaching your child's brain to associate separation with success and pride. You're also teaching them that you'll always come back.

Part Two: Daycare and School Drop-Off

Bring the same tools to the morning routine. Strategic labeled praise from Step 2, and planned ignoring from Step 4.

Getting ready is where most families lose the morning before they even leave the house. Praise the behaviors you want and don't respond to the complaints. If your child puts their shoes on while grumbling about not wanting to go, praise the shoes. "Great job getting your shoes on all by yourself." Say nothing about the grumbling. Don't correct or acknowledge it.

In the car, praise getting in, then shift the conversation forward instead of backward. Don't reassure. Don't explain why it will be okay. Honestly, that kind of reasoning tends to fuel the fear rather than settle it. "You're so brave for going to school today." "Your teacher is so excited to see you!"

If your child whines or protests, don't respond to the content of it. Just stay warm and confident. "I can't wait to hear about your day."

Once you arrive, keep the praise specific and keep it moving. "Good job getting out of the car." "I love how you're walking with me and holding my hand."

Then say goodbye and part ways without lingering. Lingering is often due to our own anxiety. Understandable, but it almost always makes it worse. A long goodbye gives a child more time to escalate and evidence that you're worried too.

If tears come at that moment, don't get frustrated and don't linger longer than you planned. "I love you. I'll see you after school. I can't wait to hear about your day."

A Story

A family I worked with has a toddler who wasn't able to attend daycare last year — he got too upset at drop-off and stayed upset through the day. This school year started on similar footing. Protesting in the car, crying at drop-off, crying for most of the day. Understandably, the mom really needed her son to be able to stay in school and wasn't sure how to help him.

I spoke with the parent on a Wednesday and taught her Parent Steps 2 and 4, labeled praise and planned ignoring, and walked her through the two-part process above. She started the next morning, Thursday. Teachers reported his best day yet, with only brief crying during one transition. By Friday, the parents reported no meltdowns on the way to school, minimal complaining, and just a slight quivering lip at the door. Mom kept the drop-off short and sweet, and the teacher welcomed him warmly and helped him inside. No crying at all that day, according to his teachers.

I'll say this: his success probably also came from getting used to the new routine itself. But the parents using research-backed tools gave him the confidence he needed to get there.

If you started practicing planned ignoring after Sunday's article, I want to check in on one specific thing this week: how long did the behavior last once you started ignoring it? That's data that you want to keep in mind as you continue practicing over the coming weeks.

Most parents brace for the worst. You expect the whining or the meltdown to go on forever if you don't step in. That expectation is normal.

So here's your question for the week: did the escalation ever stop faster than you thought it would? Even once? That's the moment I want you paying attention to.

I knew a boy in early elementary school. When he didn't get his way, he would throw himself on the floor, kick, and scream at full volume. Understandably, when his parents learned planned ignoring, they were concerned it would go on for twenty minutes, maybe thirty, maybe longer. They braced themselves every single time before they even started.

They committed to it anyway. No eye contact. No talking, anger, or lectures. No response of any kind, no matter how loud it got. Just calmly waiting for him to stop or do anything positive.

The first time they held it all the way through, he stood up and walked away on his own within three minutes.

This wasn't luck, and it wasn't because their son suddenly changed overnight. It happened because that behavior had always worked for him before. The moment it stopped working, his brain didn't have a reason to keep going. His parents held the boundary.

This Is Not Neglect

I want to pause here, because I know that for some parents this approach can feel cold. When your children were infants, this is the exact opposite of what is healthy for helping a child who is upset. An infant's cry is a request for basic needs and co-regulation, and it should always be met with a response.

But I need you to hear this clearly: for children ages 4 and up, this is appropriate to use for brief periods of time, and only when you are also using heavy strategic labeled praise and daily Special Time, Parent Steps 2 and 3. Those two strategies are what make planned ignoring safe and effective. Without them, this would just be withdrawal. With them, it's one small, deliberate piece of a relationship that is otherwise full of connection and attention. A child having a tantrum over a second cookie is communicating something very different, and responding to it the same way you'd respond to an infant's cry can actually work against them.

For some children, co-regulation, you staying close, talking them through it, trying to calm them down together, doesn't actually help them calm down faster. For a child who has learned that big feelings get big attention, your calm voice and your presence in that moment can accidentally fuel the outburst rather than settle it. Planned ignoring, used briefly and strategically, teaches something co-regulation sometimes can't: how to take a breath and use their words without you standing right there prompting them through it.

Later, in Parent Steps 5 and 6, we'll talk about giving your child more direct instruction on coping skills in the moment. For now, keep it simple. Briefly and temporarily remove your attention. The instant your child calms down, or even does one small positive thing while still upset — puts a fork in the sink while still stomping their feet, for example — turn back to them right away. Give them your attention, and ideally a labeled praise. "Thanks for putting that in the sink."

You're not punishing them by staying quiet. You're teaching them that calm, or even one step toward calm, is what gets your attention back.

Most families see improvements after a few weeks of consistent practice, depending on the age of the child and severity of the challenges. Many meltdowns will still run long, especially early on, while your child is testing whether the old rules still apply. What I want you to notice this week isn't whether every single instance is short. I want you to pay attention to the pattern so that when it does start to shift, you're able to shift your praise.

Over time, with repetition, this is exactly what should keep happening. The outbursts should get shorter. They should get less frequent. And you should start dreading them less, because you'll trust that you know exactly what to do when one shows up.

Make sure you ask yourself: Are you ignoring all the way through, every single time, even when it gets worse before it gets better? And is your labeled praise showing up the second the behavior stops?

Remember: planned ignoring is technically a consequence strategy. It is a parent behavior that comes right after a child's whining for a second cookie. Once a parent is comfortable with this strategy, it is much easier to use than constant removal of privileges for whining, begging, or screaming. Eventually you run out of things to limit or take away, and that's one (of many) ways consequences can fall apart and parents get stuck and inconsistent.

Keep going this week.

If you've been following along with the Parent Steps, you know we've built a foundation. Step 1 taught you to watch the ABCs (behavioral sequences between you and your child) without judgment or making changes. Step 2 taught you the power of strategic labeled praise, our first tweak to the ABCs (a consequence strategy). Step 3 gave your child a daily dose of undivided, child-led attention through Special Time, a play activity that is an antecedent strategy. Step 4 is the second adjustment to the ABCs. Remember, with each step we work through, you are adding to the other steps, not stopping the previous steps. This is the reason getting good at each step is important before you move on. It makes learning another skill more digestible while completing the previous skills simultaneously.

Now we get to the step parents often report is the hardest skill to implement, and the one that can have the most nuances: planned ignoring.

I want to be honest with you. This step can be very difficult for many families. The word "ignoring" sounds cold. It sounds like the opposite of attentive, warm parenting. This strategy works well when done consistently, and only if you are also engaging in frequent strategic labeled praise and daily Special Time (Steps 2 and 3), both warm parenting strategies.

What Planned Ignoring Actually Is

Planned ignoring is a consequence strategy involving removal of your attention from specific, low-level negative behaviors. Whining. Complaining. Arguing after you've already answered. Repeating a demand you've already said no to. Mean comments thrown at you in frustration. We never ignore aggression, destroying items, throwing things, and definitely not genuine distress or being hurt. I'll come back to that distinction later in the article.

Here's the principle underneath it. You already learned it in Step 2: when you give attention to a behavior, it increases. Whatever you give your attention to, you will see more of. This is true whether the attention is positive or negative. A parent who continues to engage with a child that is whining is still giving the whining their attention, their eye contact, and their engagement. To a child who is not feeling connected with you or given positive attention, even a scolding is proof that whining works. It got you to stop what you were doing and look at them.

Planned ignoring flips that. You remove your voice, your eye contact, and your facial expression from the negative behavior entirely. Not forever. Just for as long as the behavior lasts. The moment it stops, your attention comes right back, usually in the form of a labeled praise or positive statement. I'll walk through exactly what that looks like below.

The Trap Most Families Are Stuck In

The cycle that families often find themselves in with children with significant disruptive behavioral challenges has a name and has been researched for decades. Psychologists call this the coercive cycle, and once you understand it, it becomes much easier to change.

Here is how it works. Your child wants something. You say no. Your child escalates, maybe with whining, maybe with a full meltdown. You hold the boundary and say no again, maybe with an extra explanation or two. The child escalates further. This back and forth can be short-lived or it can last for some time. But eventually, someone has to give in in this interaction. And for many understandable reasons, it's often the parent. You're exhausted and want the noise to stop, so you may either give in or, at a minimum, give the attention they want by engaging with them. Either way, this experience teaches your child that escalation works. If asking nicely didn't get the answer they wanted, whining repeatedly might.

Now flip it around. Your child is playing quietly, calmly, independently. What happens? Probably nothing. You're doing dishes, answering an email, finally getting a moment to yourself. You're not engaging, because why would you interrupt something going well?

Without meaning to, you have built a house where calm, appropriate behavior gets ignored but escalated, difficult behavior gets attention. You are the most important person in your child's life, so your attention is rewarding no matter what form it takes. Your child knows one behavior gets me noticed and the other one doesn't. Over time, both of you get pulled deeper into the cycle. Your child escalates faster and harder because it has worked before. You respond faster and louder because you're depleted and you know from experience that calm requests don't move things along. Everyone is frustrated and probably tired.

This is not a reflection of bad parenting. This can happen in any family, but it's especially common in homes with children who have ADHD or related behavioral challenges such as oppositional or severe anger issues. These kids are often louder, faster to escalate, and harder to redirect than other more regulated siblings or children you know. It's tiring and can make a parent feel lost and dysregulated themselves.

Planned ignoring, paired with labeled praise, is one of the most direct ways out of this cycle.

How This Breaks the Pattern

When you stop responding to whining, arguing, and badgering, and instead you show up fully, warmly, and enthusiastically for calm behavior, you are rewriting the rules of the house. You are teaching your child a new and much healthier lesson: my parent's attention comes from being calm, not from screaming or mean words. I want to be clear, your child is allowed to feel anger, frustration, or have things they want. This is completely normal, of course, and our goal is not to get rid of anger. Our goal is for them to communicate it in a healthy way and accept the limits and boundaries you place for your family.

Planned ignoring does not feel good in the moment, especially in the beginning of practice. The reason this step is often described as hardest by parents I work with is because when you first start ignoring a behavior that has worked for your child in the past, it is going to predictably get worse before it gets better. Your child has learned, through repetition, that if they push a little harder, you will eventually respond. So when you stop responding, their brain says try harder. The whining gets louder. The tantrum gets longer. This is not a sign that planned ignoring isn't working. It is a sign that it is working exactly as it should, and your child is testing whether the old rules still apply. You have to remember this when you start to ignore so that you are prepared for the likely escalation.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that in order for the behaviors to stop in that moment and to become much less frequent over time, you have to ignore all the way through the behavior or escalation, not just the first fifteen seconds of it. When you ignore all the way through, the behavior has to end eventually, and that ending of the negative behavior is called an extinction burst. Your child will stop and let it go. Over time, planned ignoring will make it so that the extinction bursts happen quicker. If you cave partway through a meltdown by talking to them or giving in to any requests, you haven't taught your child that calm gets attention. You've taught them that a bigger meltdown gets attention and reward. That is the single most common reason this step backfires, and it's almost always this: a parent starts ignoring, the child escalates, the parent's resolve cracks, and they respond. That one moment of giving in will undo this strategy's ability to reduce outbursts. Hold the line all the way through, and I promise you the ceiling comes down over time, and often the behaviors are eliminated altogether. That's the goal. Look for the extinction burst.

A Step Further: Steps 2 and 4 Are the Same Skill

Importantly, this is the part of the Parent Steps where we bring together Step 2, strategic labeled praise, and Step 4, planned ignoring. This concept of using both flexibly is called differential attention.

Differential attention simply means you are giving your attention on purpose, not on autopilot. You give it generously to the behaviors you want to see more of, using strategic labeled praise. You remove it deliberately from the behaviors you want to see less of, using planned ignoring. Used together, they teach your child something far bigger than any single skill: attention in this house is earned through calm, appropriate behavior, not through volume.

Here's what that actually looks like in a single interaction. Your child asks for more screen time. You say no, they've already had their time today. They start whining. You explain calmly: "You know the rules. I'm not going to talk about this anymore." You then stop responding. No eye contact, no response, no lecture about why whining won't work. They escalate, maybe cry, maybe stomp off. You continue to hold steady and calm. A few minutes in, they stop. Maybe they walk away. Maybe they just go quiet. The second that happens, you are back in, connected to them, warm and specific: "I know that wasn't the answer you wanted. Thanks for calming down." If you've been working on encouraging your child to use coping skills, excellent. Shift the praise to "I know that was hard to hear. Great job going to your calm-down corner." "I know that was not what you wanted, but amazing job taking your deep breaths and letting it go." That last part is important. You need to use labeled praise as soon as you see the extinction burst. Planned ignoring without the return of labeled praise teaches your child that you withdraw. Planned ignoring paired with labeled praise teaches your child that you are warm, available, and ready when they are.

This is the whole engine of the coercive cycle running in reverse. Instead of escalation earning attention and calm earning silence, calm earns warmth and escalation earns nothing until it stops.

What Planned Ignoring Is Never Used For

This is the part I most want you to sit with, because I never want a parent walking away from this article thinking I told them to ignore their child's real pain.

We do not ignore a child who is hurt, physically injured, or experiencing real emotional pain. A child who scrapes their knee needs you. A child who is crying because a friend was cruel to them at school needs you. A child who is overwhelmed, scared, or grieving needs your full presence. Planned ignoring is a tool for shaping specific, low-stakes, attention-seeking behaviors. It was never designed for, and should never be used for, moments of authentic distress. If you are ever unsure, err on the side of connection every time. You will not break this program by comforting your child when they are genuinely hurting.

For families dealing with aggressive or destructive behaviors, it's just as important to know what we never ignore: hitting, kicking, punching, biting, throwing things, or breaking things. If your child escalates to being physical or destructive while you are ignoring, you stop ignoring immediately and respond the way you normally would. If you feel your own use of consequences is not effective or you're not sure how to respond to aggressive behavior, my advice before we get to consequences (Step 6) is to physically separate yourself from your child who may be hitting you. If they are breaking things, intervene to remove the items they are trying to throw or break. We want to avoid your child making physical contact with you or others. Separate until they calm down. And then, no matter how hard it was, use praise when you see that extinction burst (they stop the behavior). Once we get to Step 6, you'll know how to adjust your own consequences to be appropriate for a child who is hitting.

And I want to emphasize this point again: if you are using planned ignoring, a consequence strategy, without frequent strategic labeled praise throughout the day and daily, consistent Special Time, this strategy will not be effective. Using consequences such as planned ignoring without positive attention strategies is not effective at creating a warmer relationship and increasing compliance and listening.

Your Home Practice

For the next two weeks, practice ignoring and differential attention (pairing with praise). Every time you catch whining, badgering, or disrespectful comments made out of frustration, do not give it attention or make it a teaching moment. Effective teaching moments come later during calm, neutral times. Hold the ignoring all the way through, even when it gets worse before it gets better. And the moment your child settles, show up with a specific, warm labeled praise.

Keep Special Time running daily alongside this. We do not move on to Step 5 until you've noticed some real shift in the frequency or intensity of the meltdowns. You don't need perfection. You need evidence that the cycle is starting to bend the other direction.

When I am assessing a family's progress, I think through three data points: Are the meltdowns less frequent? Are they less intense? And is the time it takes for your child to calm down getting faster? My goal by the time a family graduates from the Parent Steps is improvement in all three, but as you're just starting to use these strategies, movement in any one of them is evidence that things are heading the right direction. I reassess these same three points with families every week against the specific challenges they came to me to solve.

If you do not see any improvement on these points within two weeks of frequent practice of Steps 2 through 4 (praise, Special Time, and planned ignoring), or your child's behavior includes aggression that makes this step difficult to implement safely, that's a sign you need support from a licensed psychologist or therapist trained in these strategies, not a sign that you're failing. Every family's starting point is different.

Planned ignoring is a strategy that gives parents a way out of a cycle that is not healthy for you, your child, or the rest of your family. This strategy can work wonders and results in happier, healthier interactions over time, including teaching emotion regulation. At this point in the program, many parents report that their child is warmer towards them, more loving, and wants to spend more time with them, among other improvements.

Sit in a restaurant for twenty minutes and count how many adults are engaging with their child or teen for the entire meal, and how many parents are looking at their phone or glancing at their phone repeatedly. The conversation about screen addiction in children and teens has a hole in the middle of it, and, we as the parents, are at the center. I am not writing this to make anyone feel terrible — I am guilty of this too. Our phones are work, calendars, cameras, ways to communicate with loved ones. But, since having a child, I have realized the extent to which the conversation around screen time in kids and teens is missing a major point. We need to look in the mirror.

The Conversation We Keep Having

We talk constantly about kids and screens. Too much time on the tablet. Games designed by people who understand reward schedules that create a dopamine hit and cause more drive to play longer. All of that is real, and the people who built those systems carry some responsibility for them.

But there is a second half to this, and it is harder to say out loud.

Children are growing up watching us. And a great many of us are on our phones far more than we realize, in front of them, during the exact moments they need us most.

The Research Has a Name for This

Researchers call it technoference, and it's become a large topic of conversation in the research world. It refers to the everyday interruptions in face-to-face time that happen because of a device. Not the hours you spend on your phone after bedtime. The seconds and minutes that break into time you are already spending with your child.

In a study published in 2016 by McDaniel and Coyne, mothers of children under three were asked how often technology interrupted their interactions with their child. The results were maybe not surprising but alarming nonetheless. Sixty-five percent reported it happening during playtime. Twenty-six percent during mealtime. Twenty-two percent reported it interrupting them during discipline and limit setting. This is all concerning for reasons outlined below, but the interruptions during play are the most concerning to me from a child development perspective.

Play is the single most important window you have with a young child. It is where language develops, where emotions get named, and where your child learns engaging with you is rewarding and fun. This is critical to the parent-child relationship and attachment. And it is the activity highly interrupted by parent screen use.

Why a Child's Body Registers This as Stress

There is a study I think about often. First conducted fifty years ago and replicated many times since.

It is called the Still Face Paradigm. A parent sits face to face with their infant and plays normally. Smiling, talking, responding. Then, on instruction, the parent's face goes blank. They stay physically present, still looking at the baby, but they stop responding. No expression. No sound. Two to three minutes.

What happens next is hard to watch.

Tronick et al. (1978) found that within seconds, the infant notices and starts working. They smile bigger, point, reach, vocalize, try every social bid they have to bring the parent back. When it does not work, they fall apart. They turn away. They slump. Many cry.

This is not only an emotional reaction. Infants in this paradigm show measurable physiological stress: elevated heart rate and increases in cortisol.

The parent never left the room. Unresponsiveness alone was enough.

A parent glancing at a phone is not identical to the still face experiment. You may not be holding a blank stare for three minutes straight. But it is the same mechanism in smaller doses, many times a day. Your face goes neutral and unavailable. Your child's bid for connection lands on nothing, and they learn over time you are not responsive. Responsiveness is critical to parental attachment, which is the root of healthy emotional and psychological well-being in children and adults.

What Connection Is Actually Building

When you look at your child while they talk, your face is doing work.

Children learn to read emotion by watching faces respond in real time. They learn that a furrowed brow means concern and a warm face means safety. They learn empathy by having their own feelings mirrored back by someone who was paying attention. They learn that their words cause something to happen in another person, which is the foundation of communication itself.

When you are looking down, your child is trying to engage with the top of your head.

This is not sentimentality. Higher technoference has been associated with less warmth in parent-child interactions, and with more child behavior problems, both externalizing behaviors like tantrums and defiance and internalizing behaviors like withdrawal and anxiety (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018; Stockdale et al., 2018).

The Part That Lets Us Off the Hook, and the Part That Does Not

Before you spiral into guilt, know this. The relationship runs in both directions. Longitudinal research found that difficult child behavior predicted more parent technology use due to the level of stress the parent felt. Which makes complete sense. When your child has been screaming for forty minutes, your phone is the nearest available exit. It is a quiet little escape temporarily.

Hard behavior drives parents toward their phones. But then phone use during interactions is associated with harder behavior. Around it goes.

That should reduce your shame, not your responsibility. You are not a bad parent for reaching for your phone. But you are the only one in this loop who can decide to break it, because you are the adult.

Researchers in this area have asked directly whether it is even fair to tell parents to simply use their phones less (Torres, Radesky, Levitt & McDaniel, 2021). I don't think there is a perfect answer. Your phone is your work, your calendar, your camera, your pediatrician's after-hours line. "Use it less" is not a great plan in my opinion. But using it differentially may be the answer. Protecting specific windows completely works better than trying to pretend we can cut entirely.

Parent Step 3 Protects the Connection, Phone Free

If you have been following the Parent Steps, you know that Step 3 is special time. Five to fifteen minutes a day of child-directed play (depending on the age of the child), where your child leads and you follow.

I have written about the mechanics: what you do, what you avoid, which activities work. This is the part underneath all of it.

Special time works because it is a concentrated dose of exactly what the research above says children need. Your face, available. Your voice, responsive. Your attention undivided, for a defined period, every day.

The DO skills are all connection skills and ways to give positive attention. Labeled praise requires you to be watching closely enough to notice something specific. Behavior descriptions require you to be watching at all. Reflections require you to have heard what your child said. None of these are possible with a phone in your hand.

So when I tell families the phone goes in another room during special time, that is not etiquette. It is instruction given for an important reason. Ten minutes of split attention is not a smaller version of special time. It is a different thing, and it does not produce the same result.

Special time is also repair. In the Still Face research studies, what happens between the parent and child after matters enormously. The reunion, when the parent's face comes back, is where the child recovers. A daily, protected, fully present window builds a reunion into every single day.

What to Do This Week

Put the phone in another room during special time. Not face down, not in your pocket. Another room. Silenced notifications still pull at you because you know they might be arriving. Even if you resist the urge to pull out your phone, the notification or vibration will pull your attention away from the strategies you're attempting to engage in during play.

Say it out loud when you do need to check. Teaching your child that your phone is a tool rather than something used for fun or entertainment may be a good approach. "I need to look at something for two minutes, then I am coming right back." "I need to check my calendar to know when our doctor's appointment is." "I need to reply to grandma's text so she knows when to come over." Children handle a stated absence far better than an unexplained one. It also stops them concluding they lost you to something more interesting than them.

Watch the transition moments. School pickup, walking through the door at the end of the day, the first ten minutes of a meal, and when your children speak to you. These are reunion points, and they are arguably the most critical. Transition moments — phone away entirely. If you are on your phone and your child comes up to speak to you, phone down immediately, even if temporarily. This takes practice and it won't be perfect. But it's worth improvement.

Batch it. Check three times in an evening on purpose instead of eleven times by reflex. Reflexive checking is what your child learns from, because it is what they see modeled dozens of times a day. Your child will pay attention to what you attend to. My daughter certainly has an interest in my phone despite never holding it and me moving it out of sight as soon as she sees me look at it. She has learned I am interested, so she is interested. I have work to do on this as well.

Pay attention to how you come back. Look up, make eye contact, respond to whatever they were saying before you looked away. The return matters, so practice this when you catch yourself.

Do not aim for zero. Aim for protected windows where you are completely there, and when you really need your phone, explain to your child what you're doing. Ideally, you can give a warm positive statement before telling them you need to take a look at something on your phone. For example, "Sweetie, I loved that you were showing me your drawing. The flower you made is beautiful. I can't wait to see more. I am going to take a look at my phone to see if grandma replied to let us know when she is coming over." Extra effort? Yes. Worth it? Definitely.

Your child is not competing with a screen for your attention. They are learning, from watching you, what a person does with a phone in their hand. They will do it too if we continue in this manner. We can do this!

It's Wednesday, so you've had a few days of special time since Sunday's post. I want to check in now, because this is the step where parents either start seeing the shift or quietly decide it isn't working before it's had a chance to.

Overall, special time is supposed to be an extremely positive experience for your child. The mindset is they can do no wrong during this time, and you layer on the positive attention using the 3 DO skills: labeled praise, behavior descriptions, and reflections.

But when things feel hard, it's hard to know how to course correct and easy to feel like this step won't work.

Here's what I often hear in the first week.

Your child ignored special time or refused to engage.

This is common, especially if your child has been testing you for a while. Kids don't trust new attention right away. They've learned that positive attention from you often comes with a catch, a lesson, a correction. So they wait to see if this is real before they buy in. If your child walked away, said "this is stupid," or sat there doing nothing, don't cancel special time and don't lecture them about it. Try to keep engaging in the play and narrate what you're doing. If your child runs over, give them the strategic labeled praise: "Thanks for coming back over! I can't wait to see what you want to build now." If they don't come over right away, keep going for the remainder of special time. When the timer goes off, say aloud so your child can hear, "Special time is over. I can't wait to see what you want to do for special time tomorrow." Be genuine and do not lecture them on needing to participate tomorrow. Sit down again tomorrow, same time, same amount of enthusiasm. Keep narrating and praising even if they're barely participating. Most families see engagement shift within two to three days. The child who acts unbothered on day one is often the child who asks for special time unprompted by day seven.

You slipped into commands without noticing.

This is the most common one. It's okay! You're not meant to be perfect at the skills right away. You're watching your child build, and you say with a smile, "Why don't you add a roof?" or "Careful, that's going to fall." Neither of those is a labeled praise, a description, or a reflection. They're commands, even when they don't sound like it and even when you mean it in a positive or helpful manner. If you catch yourself mid-sentence, stop and redirect to a description instead: "You're stacking those really high." The goal isn't perfection this week. The goal is noticing when you slip, because noticing is what lets you correct it.

You asked a question and didn't realize it broke the rule.

"What are you building?" feels harmless, but it's a question, and questions shift control back to you or can be overwhelming to a busy-brained child. Swap it for a reflection instead. If they say "I'm building a castle," you say "Oh, you're building a castle." Same information, but they led it, you followed. This one takes practice to catch because it feels so natural to ask. If they aren't speaking much and you're not able to reflect because of that, use my trick that I refer to as wonder statements. Instead of asking "What are you building," rephrase to "I wonder what you're building." A small shift, but important to gauge curiosity without demanding an answer right away. Note: if your child is not speaking much, then reflect everything they say. Giving positive attention when they speak via reflections will typically increase their communication during play.

Ending special time turned into a fight.

This shows up commonly with most kids, particularly those with severe behavioral challenges. The timer goes off and your child wants more, and you're not sure whether to hold the line or extend it. Hold the line. If you extend the 5 minutes to 12 because they cried, you've just taught them that pushing back and escalating or yelling works to accomplish their goals. The Parent Steps program teaches parents to start holding boundaries. This is an "easy" way to start doing that without major discipline strategies. Give a transitional warning before the end, "one more minute of special time," and then end it consistently, calmly, and the same way every day. If they're upset when it ends, walk away calmly. But keep in mind this is actually a good sign. It means the time mattered to them. Often it also means they're afraid it won't happen again. Acknowledge it without giving in. "I know you want to keep playing, but remember special time is a new thing we do every day now. We'll do this again tomorrow. I can't wait." Then move on to the next part of your day without dwelling on it.

It felt boring, awkward, or like you were faking it.

Completely normal. Keep doing it anyway. Instead of focusing on how you feel during it or whether you're doing it right, bring your attention back to your child and the skills you're practicing. This is especially helpful if you're not sure what to say. Have a normal conversation with them but focus heavily on the praise, reflections (repeat or paraphrase what they say), and behavior descriptions (describing what the child is doing with the toys).

You missed a day or did it inconsistently.

Life happens, and missing one day won't undo your progress. But if special time is happening three days one week and zero the next, your child won't settle into it the way they would with daily consistency, and you are guaranteed to not see any therapeutic change in your child's behavioral challenges and therefore the family dynamic. If you missed a day, don't try to make up for it with a longer session tomorrow. Just pick back up at the same time, same length, and keep going. The research shows that 5 out of 7 days is the minimum amount per week to still see a clinical, therapeutic improvement.

If you haven't started yet, open your calendar right now. Pick your window, same time every day, and start today. If you can't do the same time each day due to scheduling or sports, that's fine. Map out the times per day of the week and stick to it. The families who see the fastest shift in listening and mood are the ones who protect this time the same way they'd protect a medication schedule: daily, non-negotiable, no exceptions for a bad day.

Parent Step 3 is a child-directed play activity, one-on-one with you. This approach is used in other treatments, including Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, where it's called special time. Special time (or one-on-one time, if your child is 8 or older) is a brief daily activity between you and your child. I like to recommend families engage in 5 to 15 minutes depending on age, but stick to the same time frame each day. In other words, if you choose 5 minutes a day, I would not recommend doing 15 minutes on some days. If your child has behavioral challenges, this will set you up for a fight when you go back to 5 minutes.

Your child chooses the activity and leads it. Your job is to follow along and use a few specific verbal skills while avoiding others. We call these the "DO" and "DON'T" skills.

DO: Strategic labeled praise (Parent Step 2). Behavior descriptions. Reflections.

DON'T: Ask questions. Give commands or directions. Criticize.

Whether special time happens is not your child's choice. They don't get to opt out. This is a tool you're using to improve your child's mood, listening, confidence/self-esteem, independence, and your relationship with them.

Why This Isn't the Same as "Quality Time"

I understand we're all busy and you already spend time with your child. Meals, homework, driving to activities, playing outside, and reading together. All of that matters. But Step 3 isn't more of what you're already doing.

The difference is control. Most of a child's day is other people directing them: where to be, what to eat, how to act. Kids with challenging behaviors are often chasing a sense of control above everything else. Special time flips that. For a few minutes every day, they're in charge, and you're there watching them lead, using a few specific statements that have a real therapeutic effect.

I didn't develop special time. It's been studied for decades and is a core piece of PCIT (Parent-Child Interaction Therapy). I've taught it to families for 8 years, 6 of those as a certified PCIT therapist.

Here's the part people skip: if you correct your child during special time, tell them to switch activities, or point out they're breaking a rule, you are moving away from the ways in which the play is beneficial therapeutically.

What you do:

Let your child choose the activity and lead it. Show up fully: phone away, other tasks paused, on the ground or at the table, eye contact. Keep it short, daily, and at the same time each day if possible.

Focus on the verbal skills: give warm, frequent strategic labeled praise ("Great job building that tower"), describe what the child is doing ("Now you're adding an extra level to the tower"), and reflect what your child is saying — child says "I think I want to make it taller," parent repeats or paraphrases, "Oh, you want to make it taller."

What you don't do:

Give instructions, commands, or corrections, even if well-intentioned ("Put the lego here," "How about we color instead of build legos?" "No, don't do that"). Criticize anything they do, even if it bugs you — this is not a teaching moment ("I don't like it that way. Let's put it here"). Sit quietly watching without engaging in conversation. Talk so much that the child can't get a word in or lead the activity. Sit at a table while they are on the floor or sitting far from your child. Disengage because the dishes or laundry are calling.

Predictability matters as much as the activity. A child who knows special time comes every day (ideally at the same time) settles into it faster than one who gets it three times one week and not at all the next.

Picking the Right Activity

The activity needs to be hands-on and ideally creative or constructive.

Best special time activities: Legos. Magna tiles. Coloring. Arts and crafts (as long as not overly messy). Playsets. Bracelet making. Backyard sports (with a few important caveats).

These activities all work well because the child can easily lead and leave you plenty of room to practice the 3 DO skills (praise, descriptions, reflections). Sports are the exception worth a note. Parents naturally want to coach the perfect throw or kick ("Throw it like this," "Give it a top spin," "Do it this way.") These are well-intentioned statements, but in behavioral parent training they are technically commands, where you are telling them what to do. This is what we want to avoid for these 5–15 minutes. Let go of coaching entirely and stick to praise: "Great kick." "Perfect aim." "I love your focus on that throw." "Nice effort."

Many common daily activities are not ideal for special time.

Not special time activities: Reading. Screen time/movie. Shopping. Going out to eat. Anything messy like painting. Card or board games with strict rules.

Games with rules are a trap: your child will bend them, and you'll feel the pull to step in and teach. Messy activities create the same pull ("Wait, stop!" "Watch the carpet!"). Shopping, TV, and going out of the house aren't quite the creative activities that will allow you to frequently praise, reflect, and describe what your child is doing. Don't set yourself up with activities you can't practice the skills in — that's where the magic happens.

What to Expect

The first few days can feel awkward. Letting your child lead can feel unnatural at first. Take a back seat, but stay engaged and talk with them.

Special time isn't meant to replace your normal parenting, and your child shouldn't be in control all day. It's a concentrated dose of connection that does real work on the relationship and on their willingness to listen the rest of the day. Most families see increased listening and a better relationship within 1 to 3 weeks of doing it daily.

Note that in Parent Step 2 (strategic labeled praise) we praise throughout the day. Think of special time as an opportunity to engage in a very high dose of positive attention including praise.

There are a few ways parents get stuck on this step. A child who won't engage in special time is one common challenge. Kids test whether this new attention is real before they accept it. Another one is how to end special time without giving in to a tantrum for more time. Here we'll cover the concept and what it looks like when it's working.

Your Homework This Week

Open your calendar now and schedule in times for special time with your child. Find your 5 to 15 minutes: right after school, right before dinner, wherever it fits. Put it on the schedule, same time each day if possible, and start today.

If it feels awkward at first, that's expected. Keep showing up, keep praising, and give it time to work.

Details in this article are drawn from real families. Ages, details, and other identifying information have been changed to protect confidentiality.

The parents of a four year old little boy worked with me several years ago. They described a very active boy with big emotions who was extremely verbally advanced and very much knew what he wanted. All great qualities, and we joked that he would make a great lawyer one day (or doctor like his parents). But, the child was having trouble with anger, and the parents felt unsure how to teach him to navigate those emotions in a healthier way. Their goal was to teach him to communicate more calmly and do so without putting his hands on his family members when upset. It was clear the parents were thoughtful and seemingly kind, reasonable people. They could tell they were in a cycle with the child and verbalized that they felt like they were making things worse with how they were responding to him in the heat of the moment.

I walked through Parent Step 1 (ABC's of behavior) with them which involved explaining the importance of the behavioral sequences when engaging with the boy: what comes right before the behavior (A – antecedent), what does he do (B – behavior), and what happens right after his behavior (C – consequence). They were able to identify the sequences right away. A common scenario was around the transition from play time to dinner and it often played out in these ways:

Antecedent – Told the boy to pick up the toys because it was time for dinner. Behavior – Boy ignored parents. Consequence – Parents repeated themselves while raising voice and within a few minutes, gave him extra time playing.

Antecedent – Parents started picking up toys that boy was playing with due to it being dinner time. Behavior – Boy yelled and hit parents on the arm while they were cleaning up. He started to put the toys away while crying. Consequence – Parents raised voice to correct him and said he was going to get less time to play tomorrow.

Antecedent – Told the boy to pick up the toys because it was time for dinner. Behavior – Boy yelled that he wanted more time. Consequence – Parents walked over and helped him pick up toys (boy then continued to complain, yell, and pout at dinner). Boy kept hands to himself.

Now that the parents understood how the ABCs of behavior works in this common scenario for them but also throughout the day, they were able to break down where to make changes. Parent Step 2 (strategic labeled praise) taught them how to make the first change — shifting their attention to the positive behaviors the child engages in, particularly surrounding those difficult moments they are trying to improve.

During the play to dinner transition, I coached the parent to begin thanking him for cleaning up or putting toys away or coming to dinner, even when he complained, yelled, or pouted. Calmly stated "Thanks for cleaning up" even when it was challenging. He could be crying or pouting but if he picks up a toy and reluctantly puts it in the bin, tell him "Thanks for putting that away," "Nice job helping me," and "Wow you're doing a great job putting those toys back." If he was having a meltdown, ignore it (discussed more in Parent Step 4). Do not give more attention to it or respond to him verbally. Wait until he acted calm and give him strategic labeled praise for calming down: "I appreciate you calming down. Now we can go see what yummy dinner we have tonight."

This principle works well because of a simple behavioral concept: when you give attention to a behavior it increases. When a child does something positive (even if minor or reluctantly) and you respond with a positive labeled praise, you will see the behavior he engaged in more and more, with repetitive praise. Labeled praise is a positive consequence in the ABCs of behavior sequence. Parents are shifting the response to the child, and it will lead to more positive behavior over time, with repetition.

This is how I had them shift the examples above to improve the scenario and lead to less battles:

Antecedent – Told the boy to pick up the toys because it was time for dinner. Behavior – Boy ignored parents. Consequence – Parents repeated themselves while raising voice and within a few minutes, gave him extra time playing. Parents walked over and required him to pick up toys. When he started to cry and put the toy in a bin, they told him genuinely, "Thanks for listening."

Antecedent – Parents started picking up toys that boy was playing with due to it being dinner time. Behavior – Boy yelled and hit parents on the arm while they were cleaning up. He started to put the toys away while crying. Consequence – Parents raised voice to correct him and said he was going to get less time to play tomorrow. Parents told him he was not allowed to hit and would not be able to play as long tomorrow. They quickly noticed he was actually starting to put the toys away (even reluctantly) and told him, "Thank you so much for putting the toys away."

Antecedent – Told the boy to pick up the toys because it was time for dinner. Behavior – Boy yelled that he wanted more time. Consequence – Parents walked over and helped him pick up toys (boy then continued to complain, yell, and pout at dinner). Boy kept hands to himself. Parents noticed quickly that he was upset but keeping his hands to himself. They told him genuinely, "I know you wanted to play more. Great job keeping your hands to yourself while you're upset."

Now there were several other tweaks I had planned to make with this family in the other Parent Steps. Later on I had them make changes to expectations, changing playtime to after dinner, and shifted their consequence to a more immediate one when he hit them. But, for now, we were on Step 2, and I wanted them to get good at this step before moving on. I had them focus just on getting good at praising the positive behaviors first.

I told the family to work on this heavily for the next two weeks. Fourteen days of heavy labeled praise, not only during this one scenario, but throughout the day in all other scenarios where he was engaging in positive behaviors. Praise calming down after every moment of frustration or anger, praise listening when he followed through with instruction, praise transitioning well when he did so, praise using words instead of his hands, and give him plenty of positive warm statements ("I love playing with you.")

The family returned after two weeks and reported significant improvements in the child's demeanor, mood, and listening. He seemed more eager to please the parents, would start to put the toys away more quickly, he was more affectionate with them with hugs, and the arguments or battles were shortening. We still had more to work on to improve routines and anger, but this is a good example of how a parent's change in attention could change their overall day-to-day experience as a family.

As I wrap up this story, I want to point out something that I commonly hear. The parents shared that they felt embarrassed they had not been doing this on their own. They described feelings of guilt that they did not give a lot of attention to the positive behaviors. Here's the thing: humans are wired to attune to threat. No one is immune to this natural process. Parents, especially those navigating challenging child behaviors, focus heavily on a child's anger or meltdown for this reason. You are trying to fix it, change it, help them. But what can happen is as the behaviors continue to worsen over time, the parents' attention becomes even more focused on the yelling, the hitting, the pouting, and less and less on the small positive moments happening right alongside them. The small (or large) positive moments happen and parents often take a breath and just don't acknowledge it at all.

The reason this worsens the situation is that kids thrive on their parents' attention, and negative attention still counts as attention to a child's brain. Yelling, correcting, and negotiating in the heat of the moment can accidentally reinforce the very behavior parents are trying to reduce. This is why the ratio of time spent noticing positive behavior versus negative behavior matters so much. Shifting more of your attention onto what is going right, even in small or reluctant moments, is what changes the overall dynamic in a home over time. These parents saw it happen with more and more positive moments that became more obvious given the shift in attention.

I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting parents don't respond to negative scenarios. Parent Steps 4 and 6 focus on how to implement consequences appropriately in a way that will reduce the problem behavior from happening again. But if the ratio of attention you're giving to your child is leaning more toward the negative behaviors and less toward positive, we're going to have a very hard time making improvements.

This family went on to complete the Parent Steps program and were able to reduce arguments entirely surrounding the play to dinner transition. Have a scenario that you find particularly challenging at home? Try to implement Step 2 and see how it goes.

This article is for educational purposes and isn't a substitute for individualized clinical care.

Montessori philosophy gets a lot right. Respect for a child's independence, structured environments, letting kids build competence through repetition instead of rescue. I recommend Montessori principles in homes regularly and will continue to use them with my own family.

But there is one place where I think the philosophy gets it wrong, and it happens to be one of the most important tools I teach parents in the Parent Steps, one that has been tested for decades by clinical researchers to be effective, particularly with children with behavioral challenges. Montessori discourages praise. Traditional Montessori guidance tells parents and teachers to avoid saying "good job," to withhold evaluative language, and to let the child's own satisfaction in mastering a task be the only reward. The concern is real: praise can become a statement disconnected from anything the child actually did, and over time kids can start performing for the praise instead of the task.

I understand the concern, but I don't believe the fix is to withhold praise.

The Distinction Montessori Philosophy Misses

Generic praise, the "good job" and "you're so smart" variety, has a mixed track record. Praising a child's traits or intelligence rather than their effort can make kids more afraid of failure and less willing to attempt hard things, because the praise ties their worth to an outcome instead of a process. The constant praising of only A's in school can and does lead some children to develop perfectionism or anxiety regarding anything less than perfect. I've worked with teen patients in my practice, and this is a real concern I've seen.

But there's a second category of praise that behaves completely differently, and it's the one Montessori philosophy throws out along with the first: labeled praise, or what I term strategic labeled praise. This is praise that names the specific behavior. Instead of "good job," you say "Good job putting your shoes away on your own." Instead of "you're so smart," you say "I love how much effort you put into solving that math problem." I've written labeled praise scripts targeting the behaviors parents ask about most: tantrums, low effort, homework refusal, sibling conflict, among others, which can be found on my Substack page.

Labeled praise isn't evaluative in the way Montessori is worried about. It's informational. It tells a child exactly what they did that worked, which means they can do it again. I would argue it doesn't rely on a trait judgment at all. Behavioral Parent Training programs, especially Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, have built an entire evidence base around this exact tool, and it consistently shows up as one of the most reliable ways to increase positive behaviors and, equally as important, improve the parent-child relationship that is so often strained in children with behavioral challenges.

Why I Use It as a Clinical Tool, Not a Compliment

In my practice, labeled praise is not about being overly nice to your child, although the kind words do improve the relationship. It's a behavioral intervention. When a parent labels a specific behavior soon after it happens, they are giving the child's brain a clear signal: this, specifically, is what worked. Do this again. It's teaching, just delivered during the moments that are going right, not having to wait for something to go wrong to correct in an attempt to teach.

Kids with behavioral challenges especially need this kind of clarity. A child who struggles with impulse control or anger often has no idea which of their actions are landing well with a parent, because most of the feedback they get is corrective. Labeled praise flips that ratio. "Good job" gives a child nothing to act on. Naming the behavior does.

Withholding praise entirely, in the name of protecting intrinsic motivation, removes one of the few tools that reliably shapes behavior while a child is still building the internal regulation Montessori is ultimately trying to cultivate. You can't skip straight to intrinsic motivation with a five-year-old who doesn't yet have the self-regulation to get there unassisted. Labeled praise is often the bridge.

Building the Independence Montessori Is After

The irony is that labeled praise doesn't work against what Montessori cares about most. It works for it, if the strategic labeled praise from Parent Step 2 is used in a very specific manner.

Montessori philosophy is built around self-efficacy: a child who believes they are capable. That belief doesn't come from being told "good job." It comes from evidence. The key is that strategic labeled praise is nothing but evidence, delivered in real time, about exactly what a child can actually do.

I've watched this play out in the same practical life routines Montessori classrooms or homes are built around. A child pouring water from a small pitcher without spilling. Buttoning a shirt unassisted. Setting a table, putting on their shoes, spreading butter on toast with a dull knife. These are the exact tasks Montessori uses to build independence, and they're also exactly where strategic labeled praise does its best work. It gives them language for their own competence, which further builds their belief in their own ability.

Montessori wants children to walk away from a task thinking, "I can do this." Labeled praise is one of the fastest ways to get a child there, because it hands them the proof out loud, in words they can carry into the next attempt.

Where I'd Meet Montessori Halfway

I don't think Montessori is wrong that empty, constant, generic praise is a problem. It can be for some children. A parent who says "good job" reflexively, for everything, dilutes the word until it means nothing, and the child may ultimately let it go in one ear and out the other.

Here's what I tell parents who feel caught between the two philosophies. You don't have to choose withholding praise or drowning your kid in it. Assess what you've tried already. Has it worked? If yes, then keep doing what you're doing. I never want to change something a parent is doing that is genuinely working well. But if it is not working, then I would certainly recommend adding in strategic labeled praise to see if you can move the needle on the behavior or part of the relationship you want to improve. If you notice some sort of significant worsening of behavior, independence, or self-efficacy, then you can always stop. But in a decade of clinical work with families using this strategy, I have only seen strategic labeled praise improve independence, routines, and various daily life skills.

This article is for educational purposes and isn't a substitute for individualized clinical care.

The first appointment with parents after teaching Parent Step 2, strategic labeled praise, is one of my favorite meetings. It often gives me a window into what the next few months may be like with the family.

What do they remember from our last appointment? Did they try the strategies with their child? Did they try a lot? Do they show up to the appointment with notes? Do they remember what they did? Did they carve out time throughout the week to really focus on the praises and which ones to use? If two parents are in the home, are they both invested? Do they have a glimmer of hope in this process? What are their facial expressions like? Tone and body language. All of it clues me into what is going on.

The appointment this week is often really fun because so many families show up pleasantly surprised, relieved, even excited.

So check in with yourself. Where are you at right now? What do you remember from the last post that taught strategic labeled praise? Did you make time to practice? Did you take notes or remember what you did? Did you actively carve time to think through this process and give it a whirl? If applicable, is your partner also trying? How are you feeling? Any progress in your child or your family's dynamic?

Approximately 60% of families I work with report some improvement in their child's behavior, mood, or family dynamics within 1–2 weeks of beginning Parent Step 2. Maybe you're one of them. Among that 60%, some of those families report large improvements while others report minor positive moments that are new and different from before. The remaining 40% take a little longer.

If you do not notice any improvement in 3 weeks of using strategic labeled praise, then something is not right. I'm not talking perfect behaviors — I wouldn't expect that. But if you don't notice any positive shift, even if small, then we need to pause and figure it out. The strategic labeled praises aren't being utilized in the way we need to. Maybe the frequency isn't there. Maybe the tone or other complicated dynamics are getting in the way. Are you being present enough to notice the small improvements? Maybe the shaping is the hard part, and if your child's behavior is severe, it is very hard to find those small moments to attend to. If this is you, you may benefit from one-on-one support with a therapist or psychologist. It is also possible you just need to add Steps 3 and 4 before more noticeable shifts occur.

If you have noticed improvement, even small ones, amazing! I want you to reflect on what you've noticed. Is it your child's mood? Overall, less battles or pushback? More frequent smiling and happier mood? The details matter, so think very explicitly about what feels easier. If you really can't pinpoint anything other than an overall "feel," that is okay! But pay attention this coming week to get more specific with yourself on what has improved. The details matter in order to praise well. Are they completing tasks quicker? Perfect — praise speed. Are they letting go of things more easily when not getting exactly what they want? Brilliant — praise keeping calm. Are they smiling and wanting to spend more time with you? Very sweet — tell them how much you loved seeing them so happy this week.

The key to the Parent Steps is that we aren't moving on to the next step until you feel very confident in each one. So we are going to sit in Step 2 for another week before we add something new. Remember, from now on we are always using strategic labeled praises. Once we move onto the next steps it will add additional things for you to focus on, so you really want to get good at each step so it's easier to learn the next.

If you've noticed some form of improvement this week, now it's time to start focusing on the shaping concept again. As outlined in the last article, I assigned you to praise your child after calming down at the end of every meltdown. I don't care if it took 30+ minutes. You want them to be calmer; when they do it, you need to genuinely praise them: "Great job calming down." If you noticed that they have started calming down faster than usual, then you're in the perfect spot to shift to the next phase of this praise: "Great job calming down so quickly!" Say this over and over for the next week, and you should start to see additional moments when they stay calm overall in scenarios that used to anger them. Then shift the praise again: "Great job staying so calm." "Thanks for letting that go." You have to notice when these things are improving in order to reinforce that behavior and teach your child.

If you've noticed improvements, that's what I want you to focus on this week: shaping.

If you feel you need to lock in a bit more this week — great. I love that you noticed that (I praise you too). Things to praise are everywhere. Patience, communication, effort, humor, creativity, or a warm statement about spending time with them. As simple as putting their fork on the table (instead of throwing it on the floor). You can praise something they are doing in this moment or that they did recently. "Hey, I really loved that you trusted me earlier today and told me about the problem with your friend."

A few strategies you can do to help yourself:

Make sure you're focused on the positive behavior they are doing and not on the negative behavior they have avoided. Example: not "Thanks for not screaming." Instead: "Thanks for staying calm and telling me in a regular voice."

Set a repeatable alarm every 15 minutes for an evening or a day over the weekend, when you're with your child for a chunk of time. Every time the alarm goes off, find something you can give a strategic labeled praise for. This will help remind you and get you in the habit of thinking about this.

Pick a window of 60 minutes where you are praising as much as humanly possible. "Thank you..." "I love that..." "That was so smart when you..." "I appreciate..." You certainly don't need to praise so intensely that it's exhausting on a normal day, but this is meant to be a dramatic exercise to get you good at the skill.

Pick a window of 1–2 hours where you are constantly searching for the positive behaviors, small, medium, and large. Write them down in your phone in the notes app. Putting a dish on the counter. Using a napkin. Walking to put a toy in their room. Telling you how they feel while crying, but hands are to themselves. Write everything for the hour down. You may be surprised how many behaviors you notice. Again, a dramatic example to help you in this exercise. Don't forget to praise some of those as well.

If you have a partner, remind each other (gently) to encourage each other. Say the praises to your child in front of your partner while making eye contact with your partner to clue each other in.

Make sure you are labeling your praise. It's not just "Thanks!" This won't work in the same way.

Check in on your tone or facial expressions. Make sure you are not sarcastic, mad-sounding, or stone-faced. Aim for empathy and softness in hard moments that have resolved, and enthusiasm and genuine joy when the moments are already positive.

Have a great week and good luck! Next Sunday, Parent Step 3 — 10 minutes that can change everything.

It's Wednesday, so you've had a few days to try strategic labeled praise since Sunday's Parent Step post. I want to check in before we get too far into the week, because this is the step where a lot of parents either lock in or can be quietly confused as to how this really shapes behavior.

Parent Step 2, strategic labeled praise, is the first adjustment we're making within the Parent Steps program. Step 1 was observing the behavioral sequences of interactions with your child(ren) and identifying the ABCs of behavior (antecedent, behavior, and consequence). In order to see more kindness, communication, regulation, or independence, we need to adjust the antecedent or consequence that surrounds your child's behavior. Strategic Labeled Praise (Parent Step 2) is the first adjustment we're making, and it's a consequence strategy (a positive one). Read Sunday's post to get caught up on how to use strategic labeled praise, if needed.

Remember, these steps are in a specific order for a reason. If you're new here, please start at Step 1.

Here's what I hear from families within the first week of practicing Parent Step 2, and probably what some of you are noticing at home too.

Your child said nothing. Or acted like they didn't even hear you.

If this is you, you are in the majority. Somewhere around 50–60% of families tell me this is the first response they get. You think through what you want to improve, you notice the positive behavior (even if very small), you think through how to label the praise, and you throw it out there. "Hey, thanks for doing that so quickly!" And your child just keeps doing whatever they were doing or runs off.

Don't fret. This is completely normal but can feel discouraging. It can feel like you're talking to a wall, or worse, like it's not working. It is, and it will. Kids are still absorbing this even when their face isn't showing it. Keep going exactly as you have been. Don't worry about whether your child heard you. Don't comment on the lack of response, don't ask "did you hear me," don't repeat yourself three times to get a reaction. Just praise and move on with your day. The response tends to shift over the next week or two, so give it time before you decide your praise isn't landing.

Your child lit up.

Some of you are seeing smiles, maybe even a little pride. This is great and rewarding for parents, of course! You are actually reinforced to continue using labeled praise when your child smiles back, because it probably feels good to see them feel good for accomplishing something that you appreciated.

I have had several families report that their child gets curious and asks something like "Why are you talking to me like that?" The tone is positive and curious, often with a coy smile. If they ask this respectfully, be honest with them! Something simple like "Well, you do a lot of great things, and I realized I don't tell you enough, so I'm going to do that from now on!" No need to explain the strategy behind it or worry that they are "on to you." When parents express that concern, I tell them that is perfect. You want them to be "on to you." That means they know that you are noticing the positive and will reward them by telling them. Only good comes from this.

What if your child was mean or pushed back?

Remember what I said in Sunday's post. About 20–25% of children will actually initially find your praise aversive and truly not like it. If your child rolled their eyes, said "stop talking to me like that," or had an attitude about the praise, you're not alone, and this is temporary. This shows up more in kids who've had more severe challenges, or in parent-child relationships that have been strained for a while. I know this one is hard. You're putting in real effort and getting attitude back for it. But recognize this reaction for what it is: a sign that this strategy is needed even more than you may have realized. The relationship is quite fractured, and it is vital that you right the ship. This only changes if you keep using strategic labeled praise.

Now, there is a very specific way I want you to handle this that I outlined in Sunday's article, and that is to use a strategy called planned ignoring. No response to the attitude, no eye contact, no explaining yourself. Go about your day as if they hadn't said anything. This is planned ignoring, which we'll cover in full in Step 4, but you need a piece of it now. The reason this works is the same reason praise works: attention increases behavior. Engaging with the eye roll or the attitude, even to correct it, gives it attention and keeps it going. Ignore all the way through it. If you get frustrated and give negative attention, it fuels the negative cycle between you and your child, the exact opposite of what you want. Don't reply, and over time their aversive reaction to your praise will go away as long as you keep doing it frequently and genuinely. Planned ignoring is a consequence strategy (think ABCs of behavior again). We are detecting a negative behavior and we are removing our attention in response to it.

Remember, if they asked you in a fairly calm manner ("Why are you telling me these things") even if skeptical of you, tell them the truth (see the script above about them doing great things and you wanting to tell them). But if they are yelling at you, just don't reply and go about your day. Importantly, when they stop yelling, give them another strategic labeled praise, "Thanks for calming down," and divert their attention to something else positive, "I wonder what we should have for lunch." Sometimes you have to praise, ignore, praise, ignore, praise, ignore. Back and forth. This is normal in the beginning with more severe challenges, but it will get much easier if you keep doing this.

One important line here. If your child's response turns physical — hitting, kicking, throwing something — stop ignoring immediately and respond the way you normally would. Planned ignoring is only for the attitude, yelling, and the words. It is never the tool to stop aggression. If you don't have a clear consequence in mind yet, stepping into another room until things calm down is a fine stopgap for now. We'll build out your full plan for these more severe behaviors in Parent Step 6.

Be honest: how often are you using strategic labeled praise?

A quick note on frequency, because I get the sense that sometimes families don't know what I mean by my "sprinkle these throughout the day" instructions, and so over the years, I've learned to be extremely explicit to increase your chance of success.

I want you to give 2–4 labeled praises per hour when you're around your child. Not every single thing you say to them needs to be a praise, that would be exhausting and unnatural. But we want a handful of them per hour throughout the day among the times of day you are with them (at home, out at an activity, or getting a bite to eat). If that sounds like a lot right now, don't worry. It becomes far more natural within a week or two and starts to flow without you having to think so hard about it. If you are engaging in this frequency, that is perfect! You're off to a great start.

But if you're sitting there thinking, "I genuinely cannot find several positive behaviors an hour to praise," then we have a problem, but that problem is fixable.

They are there. You have to go find them, even if they are micro. A small moment of quiet play, sitting down in their chair at the restaurant, using an inside voice for five seconds, putting a spoon on the table (instead of leaving it on the floor) — all of it counts, especially if the opposite of those positives are challenges. If your child often runs around or gets up from the table, then a perfect behavior to notice is when they walk up to their chair at the restaurant and take a seat. "Thanks for sitting so we can eat" or "I appreciate you sitting so quickly. I'm excited we get to eat here!"

Another key praise that I need to emphasize is a warm statement, such as showing enjoyment in being around them. For example, "I'm glad we got to hang out so much today." That's a strategic labeled praise targeting your relationship and improving the warmth. That counts just as much as a "Thanks for sitting down" praise.

One of my favorite teaching moments with families is the first follow-up appointment after I've taught them strategic labeled praise. They've been assigned to practice the step for a week and report back at the next appointment. At times, families will spend some time recounting the week and listing a series of negative behaviors the family experienced. I understand, they are frustrating. But as they are telling me about their week, I hear often dozens of small (or big) positive moments. When I ask them what praises they used on the various scenarios they recounted, sometimes I get a list of praises that they used. Fantastic! This tells me they are on the right track to shift their attention. But other times, I get a confused look. This is one of my favorite teaching moments, because it demonstrates the problems in the parent-child relationship so well. The purpose of Parent Step 2 practice is to truly get into the habit of noticing the good, not only the hard parts.

I have empathy for this cycle because our brains are literally wired to notice threat. Historically, our attention had to detect threat, such as predators or other risks to our life, and be very attuned to those problems on a daily basis. Nowadays we don't worry about those things in the same way, but our brains continue to work hard at detecting threat. In families with children with behavioral challenges, the threat and stress that is detected becomes all-consuming, and attention is solely given to those hard, frustrating, or even dangerous moments. But your child is a child, and they are not going to be responsible for changing, nor should they be. You are the parent, and we know this can do wonders for teaching your child and for your relationship, so let's right that ship together with something that is readily available for free: your words!

The Key Is Labeled and Strategic Praise, Not Just "Thanks!"

A common challenge parents describe is their child's anger or outbursts over something that is important to them. We, as the adults, also get frustrated when something is important to us but it isn't going to plan, and sometimes we get mad and yell or are dysregulated. It's a human response. Remember your child is human, and you can have empathy for them while also wanting to help them grow, communicate their emotions, and speak respectfully. One of the quickest ways to do this is through strategic labeled praise, but the key is to use shaping.

"My child didn't have any moments where they stayed calm or didn't yell when they got upset, so I didn't have an opportunity to praise." That makes sense if you are looking for your ideal behavior. But remember, Parent Step 2 doesn't start with that. We need to take a week praising the first step of that ideal behavior, which is just calming down in general after getting very heated. At some point after they were frustrated, they stopped eventually, even if it was an hour later. That's when you need to walk up to them and say, "Hey, I know that's not what you wanted, but thanks for letting it go. Did you want to go out back and kick the soccer ball with your dad?" That's it. Praise them after every meltdown ends, no matter how hard it was. Families often tell me that within a week or two of doing this with nearly every meltdown, their child will calm down quicker than usual.

What if I'm already seeing some progress? How do I keep being strategic to get more of the ideal behaviors?

It's only been four days since the Parent Step #2 article was posted. But if you went all in on the strategy, you may notice improvements already. If that's you, your job is to notice what those improvements are. Are they doing things faster? Are they showing any more independence? Are they letting things go? Explicitly define what they are doing well and then praise them specifically for it. Shift the praise to follow their lead. Instead of just praising anytime they calm down ("Thanks for letting that go"), now your job is to shift to "Thanks for letting that go so quickly." This is the strategy. Do that for another week or two, and you should start to see moments where they actually don't even get upset. They stay calm during moments that used to cause meltdowns. Notice it, and shift your praise again. This is the ideal behavior you were hoping for at the start. "Hey, I know that's not what you wanted, but that was really cool that you stayed so calm."

Identify exactly what you're trying to improve, find the positive opposite of that behavior, and use shaping. Praise the small approximations of that opposite behavior even when they're far from where you want to end up. That's how you get several genuine praises an hour, even with a child or a parent-child relationship that's struggling.

If you haven't started yet, what are you waiting for? You've got this! Go back to Sunday's post, pick one behavior to target, and start today.

Instead of "Great job!" — try "Great job getting started on your homework so fast!" Instead of "Nice work!" — try "I love that you listened so quickly." Same warmth, same enthusiasm. The difference is specificity. And that difference is doing more work than you'd expect.

This is called strategic labeled praise. Of all the strategies in this program, this one is shown in research to matter most. In meta-analyses — studies that combine results across many clinical trials — this single strategy has the biggest impact on improving child behavior of anything I teach. Combine all of the strategies and the effect compounds. But if you only took one thing from this entire series, it would be this. Read carefully.

Why This Works

Now that you've spent a week observing the ABCs in your home, it's time for the first real adjustment: strategic labeled praise. Remember that in order to change a behavior we don't like, we need to adjust the antecedent (A) or consequence (C) in a behavioral sequence. Labeled praise is a positive consequence, the "C" in ABC. This is the first change we're making to the behavioral patterns or sequences you were tasked with quietly observing in a nonjudgmental manner over the last week.

Here's the key concept, and it's worth repeating: when you give attention to a behavior, you increase that behavior — regardless of whether the behavior is good or bad. Positive attention after a positive behavior means you'll see more of it. In other words, you give enthusiastic, warm parental attention to your child when they get ready on time and while staying calm, you will see that more often over time. But attention given to a behavior you don't like — screaming, yelling — will often make things unintentionally worse.

This is part of a broader concept called differential attention: learning to give and remove attention strategically to shape behavior. Right now, in Parent Step 2, we're focused on giving attention to the positive to increase those positive behaviors. (We'll cover removing attention, called planned ignoring, in Parent Step 4.)

So why would using strategic praise matter? Some parents feel so defeated by their child's difficult behavior that they feel they do not have any control or power to make change. If you feel this way, what I really want you to know is that you are, right now, the most important person in your child's life — more than any friend, any teacher, until the teen years shift that balance. Your words shape their emotions, behavior, and sense of self regardless of whether it seems that way right now. This is not to make you feel pressure, but instead to understand that you have powerful leverage. It means you already have more influence over this than it might feel like right now.

Labeled vs. Unlabeled Praise

So what do I mean by labeled praise? Most of us praise with "Nice job!", "Good work!", "I like that!" These are unlabeled praises. They are good for self-esteem, but too vague to change a specific behavior you're struggling with, at least not quickly.

Labeled praise names the exact thing you liked. Not "Nice job not arguing about homework" (that still draws attention to the arguing). Instead, say "Great job listening so quickly and coming to the table." Say it warmly, genuinely, smiling. Never sarcastic or clearly frustrated.

This sounds simple, and it can be. But targeting genuinely difficult behaviors takes real strategy, which is what the rest of this piece will walk you through.

"I Can't Think of Anything to Praise"

If your child's behavior has been hard for a long time, you may feel like you only notice the negative. This is a completely normal response to prolonged stress, not a personal failing. Our brains are wired to scan for threat, and a child's difficult behavior registers as exactly that.

But even the most severely aggressive children engage in positive behavior somewhere in their day. The goal is to catch the small moments, not wait for the big ones.

Shaping: Do Not Wait for Ideal Behavior to Use Labeled Praise

Shaping a behavior is key to seeing success with labeled praises. Shaping is the idea that we need to reinforce small behaviors or "wins" that you see in your child to get them to behave in the way you actually want. In other words, we are not waiting for "perfect" behavior to praise.

If you wait for your child to be perfect, you will not make progress because they won't show the behaviors frequently enough for you to reinforce through praise to actually change behavior long term. You won't get to practice the labeled praise strategy because the behavior you're waiting to praise is not happening. Perfection is not our goal. Instead, you need to find the small successes and give a lot of positive attention toward that behavior. Over time, your child will start engaging in the behavior you are praising more frequently.

For example, let's say your child frequently has meltdowns when frustrated and they last for 20+ minutes. As you are now on Step 2 and homework will be to use strategic labeled praises, I want you to praise them when they calm down. Every time. Even if it was the worst meltdown you've ever seen. It does not matter. This could sound like, "I appreciate you calming down" or "Nice job taking a breath and calming down." You are teaching your child that they get your attention when they are able to take a deep breath and calm down. You love that they finally calmed down, so you're going to tell them that specifically. This helps them learn to regulate their big emotions. Do this consistently for 1–3 weeks, and you should see the length of their meltdowns reduce.

Now, here's where additional strategy comes in and why I call this skill strategic labeled praise. As soon as you notice some improvement in the length of meltdown, you then need to shift your language from "Thanks for calming down!" to "Nice job calming down so quickly!" Notice how you are now targeting the speed of that behavior. Praise the speed at which they calm down over and over. You may feel repetitive, and that is perfectly acceptable — in fact we want repetition! You should then notice over another week or two that they calm down faster. Eventually, you should notice that your child stayed calm in a situation that used to lead to a major meltdown. This is a huge improvement, and you have to give them credit. This is a perfect example of how your praise over time has changed your child's own ability to regulate those big emotions from meltdown to staying calm. You must notice this and phrase your praise emphasizing that they stayed so calm (e.g., "Nice job staying so calm!!", "I know that wasn't what you wanted but I love how you let it go.")

The point is that over time you shift your verbal labeled praises to shape the behavior and eventually help your child learn to regulate their behavior. Again, we are not aiming for perfect behavior. This is an unreasonable expectation for any child. But we can aim for what I like to call ideal behavior. In the meltdown example, ideal behavior may be that your child gets frustrated (which is a normal emotion), but that they calm down or let it go within a few minutes, mostly on their own. This is developmentally normal for a young child and is not to be punished. Keep in mind your child's age and developmental abilities so that your expectations are appropriate. It is expected that toddlers will have meltdowns. Even if some meltdowns are developmentally normal, we can still help them learn to calm down in a healthy way. In contrast, teenagers having frequent 30+ minute meltdowns is not typically considered developmentally typical. Having an understanding of what is typical for our kids will help us regulate our own big emotions around helping them.

"Why Should I Be Nice When They're Being So Mean?"

I hear a version of this constantly: "Why should I be nice to them when they're making our family miserable?" If your child has been aggressive, defiant, or exhausting to be around, that reaction is completely reasonable. You're not alone in feeling it, and it doesn't make you a bad parent.

Here's my honest recommendation: have the thought, acknowledge it, and do your best to set it aside. Labeled praise isn't about being "nice" for its own sake — it's a strategic tool grounded in decades of clinical research on child development and behavior change. If managing your own frustration in the moment feels like more than you can do alone, working with a therapist on that piece is a completely reasonable step too.

There's a second, related instinct worth naming directly: the urge to sit down and explain to your child why their behavior needs to change. Reasoning and lecturing feel productive — surely if you just explain it clearly enough, it'll click. But children, especially in the heat of the moment, don't have the same reasoning capacity adults do. Many parents don't fully account for this, and end up frustrated when a calm, logical conversation simply doesn't land the way it would with another adult. That frustration isn't a sign you necessarily explained it badly — it's a sign the tool doesn't match the moment in a child. Change here tends to come from what you do in the moment, like a labeled praise the instant you see the behavior you want, far more than from what you explain afterward.

A Real Example: The Sibling Fight While You're Busy

You're washing the car out front. Your kids are inside, and you keep hearing screaming. Someone's hitting, someone's snatching toys. You go in, correct it, go back outside. Repeat. It's frustrating, and nothing seems to change.

Using only what you know from Parent Steps 1 and 2: set a timer for every 5 minutes if ages 4–7 and 10 minutes if they are 8–10. When it goes off, go inside and check on them. If they're playing nicely, praise it enthusiastically — "Thanks so much for playing so nicely," "I love when you guys get along" — then step back out. Set the timer for the same interval, and repeat the praising each time the timer goes off. This won't eliminate every conflict and may not resolve anything today even, but it starts training your attention — and theirs — toward the behavior you actually want to see more of. In Parent Step #5, we'll discuss how to pair an extra exciting "reward" along with the labeled praise when they are successful, as a boost to teach your kids that they are on the right track.

The younger the child, or the more severe the current behavior, the shorter your check-in window should be. You want them to be able to succeed in that window. The whole point is to catch them being good. If you wait too long and you can't praise, it defeats the purpose. Remember, when you give attention like strategic praise to your child's behavior, you will see that behavior increase or improve.

How to Build Your Own Strategic Labeled Praise

Step 1: Define the problem clearly. Example: constant whining about a sibling's toy.

Step 2: Identify the positive opposite. What would success actually look like? Be specific. Example: happily playing with their own toys, content with what they have.

Step 3: Write the praise that targets that opposite. "I love the way you're happy with your toys." "I love how you're focusing on yourself." "I love that you're happy for your sister getting to play with hers."

A second example: Problem: anger and tantrums when things don't go their way. Positive opposite: frustrated, but takes a breath, accepts the request, stays calm. Praise: "Nice job staying so calm." / "Thanks for accepting the house rule." / "I love how quickly you listened."

What to Expect When You Start

Kids respond to new praise in one of three ways.

Neutrally, or like they did not hear you. This is probably the most common response parents report to me. Your child very well may not respond at all, almost as if they are ignoring you. Don't worry, and whatever you do, do not get upset. Go about your day after you praise as normal. No response does not mean it will not work, and often this turns into a more positive response over time. If I had to estimate, approximately 50–60% of families report this initial response to praise. It still works. Keep going!

Positively. Your child may smile or show pride in themselves when you use frequent labeled praises. Keep it up! Your child may even ask curiously, "Why are you talking to me like that?" If their tone is respectful, kind, or neutral, answer honestly with something like "Well, you do a lot of great things, and I just thought I'd tell you more." Approximately 20–25% of families report their child has this sort of positive initial response when they start to use labeled praises. If your child asks you disrespectfully or rudely, see the next point.

Negatively. About 20–25% of families I work with report that their child found the praise genuinely aversive at first. The praise and warmth actually angered them, or seemed to "trigger" them. I see this most often in children with more severe defiance or aggression, or in families where the parent-child relationship has been especially strained for a period of time. Common stories from parents are their child will say with an attitude, "Don't talk to me like that" or "Why are you talking to me like that?" while rolling their eyes. This is hard for parents who are putting in real effort to praise consistently. It takes patience, and it can take time for your child to get used to this new way of interacting with you. Pushing through this stage matters. We don't move on to Step 3 until you feel comfortable praising and are seeing some level of improvement in how it's received. Just make sure you aren't unintentionally coming across as sarcastic, annoyed, or disingenuous. That would of course be the reason for the negative response.

So what do you do when praise gets a negative reaction? Use a strategy called planned ignoring. Note this is actually a part of Parent Step #4, but you'll need to use it a bit early if your child is angry or lashing out after you praise them. Ignore your child's words and attitude completely. When you remove attention from a behavior, it will extinguish, or go away, over time. No speaking, no eye contact, no facial reaction. I want you to respond as if they hadn't done anything at all. This removes the attention fueling the negative reaction, and if done correctly, their negative attitude will stop. The catch: ignoring only works if you ignore all the way through the behavior. Fifteen seconds of ignoring followed by giving in and engaging will predictably make things worse. I will explain more in Parent Step 4.

For now, only use planned ignoring in this one specific scenario: when your child reacts negatively to strategic labeled praise. We'll expand how and when to use it starting in Step 4, and the order matters here just as much as everywhere else in this program. With practice over 1–3 weeks, most children shift from that negative reaction to something more neutral or positive.

Remember, do not use planned ignoring in any other scenario except directly following praise if needed.

One important exception: if your child's negative response becomes aggressive (hitting, kicking) or destructive (throwing or breaking things), end your ignoring immediately. Respond the way you normally would, ideally with an immediate consequence — we'll cover the full discipline framework in Step 6, but for now, just do what you'd already do in that moment. Planned ignoring is never the right tool for aggression or destruction. It does not work and is not appropriate for dangerous behavior.

For example: you praise your child for calming down — "Good job calming down" — and they respond by screaming again and hitting you. Don't ignore that. Respond with your normal consequence. If you are not confident in the normal consequence you would use, a simple, effective option for now is to create physical space: step into another room until they've calmed down. We'll get into the full range of strategic consequences in Step 6, where you will get very good at coming up with appropriate consequences, determining their length, and implementing them in a consistent way that truly reduces these behaviors.

Your Homework This Week

Go heavy on using strategic labeled praise for 1–2 weeks. This is the tweak to the "C" in the ABCs of behavior. Remember, in order to change a behavior we don't like we have to change the antecedent or consequence. This is the first (positive) consequence strategy we'll discuss.

Be honest with yourself: are you catching the small wins, or only the big obvious ones? This is the foundation everything else in the program builds on. Remember shaping, and focus on the smaller wins if your ideal behavior is not clearly occurring. It is critical to do this well before moving forward to Parent Step 3.

This is Step 2 of The Parent Steps, my six-step framework for behavioral parent training. The steps build on each other, and skipping ahead won't get you the results you're looking for with your child and family.

This article is for educational purposes and isn't a substitute for individualized clinical care.

I created this Substack newsletter for families who are on therapy waitlists for child behavioral challenges or difficult family dynamics (including those on my private practice waitlist) but need support today. I hope this can help get you started.

If you are here, there's a good chance you're stuck. Another note home from camp or your child's coach. The third meltdown of the day. A shelf of parenting books that all say something different, or they tell you a strategy you want to try but you're not understanding how to tailor it to your family. Maybe you're on a waitlist right now, watching the weeks pass with no session in sight, while the meltdowns don't wait for an opening.

Here's what I want you to know first: you're trying your best in difficult circumstances with a child that did not come with a manual. You're likely just missing a few key strategies, and the order they're supposed to go in, that significantly improves parent-child dynamics.

I've seen parent after parent transform their family in a few months, as long as they actually practice the strategies at home. The parent's relief and the child's success is the most rewarding part of my job.

Who I am

I'm Dr. Emily Gault, a licensed clinical child psychologist and founder of a concierge private practice, the Center for Child Behavior. For a decade, I've sat with exhausted, capable parents who tried everything: sticker charts, timeouts, "use your words," discussions, and still felt stuck. Not because they had bad intentions or were trying outlandish parenting approaches. Because the strategies were either the wrong ones, or the right ones in the wrong order and not tailored to your specific family.

For a decade, I've worked with families of kids with ADHD, defiance, and related behavioral challenges directly in clinical work but also in my research positions. My background in clinical research allows me to give you an additional layer of context as to what we know about how to implement certain strategies for children with challenging behaviors. I've published nearly 40 peer-reviewed studies, including clinical trials on the strategies I will discuss, and I currently work with parents via telehealth in the state of Florida.

Why this exists

I built a 6-step framework called The Parent Steps, that I use in my own practice, one that moves families from daily power struggles to something that actually holds. It's based on decades of behavioral science, not social media trends.

Most families don't have access to a psychologist who specializes in this. Cost, location, a waitlist with no end date (including my own), or just not knowing where to start frequently get in the way. This is my attempt to close that gap, one skill at a time, in the same order I'd walk a family through it in my appointments.

What you'll actually get

Every post follows the real clinical sequence I use with families, starting with the relationship-building foundations most advice skips, building toward discipline last, not first (yes, on purpose).

Every week:

Sunday Strategies – Detailed articles about each of the 6 Parent Steps, why it works, and explicit instructions on how to use it and tweak it depending on your child's response. Home practice steps are outlined and assigned.

Wednesday AM – A check-in on the home practice assigned on Sunday, with reminders and motivation.

Throughout the week – Other opinion pieces, notes, and success stories.

If parenting advice has ever felt like a firehose of "just try this," this is built to feel like the opposite: deliberate, sequential, made to actually stick.

What it costs

All content is free for now.

This article is for educational purposes and isn't a substitute for individualized clinical care.

Your tax dollars have paid for researchers to find out what treatment helps families with behavioral challenges, but that knowledge is stuck in the ivory tower.

Decades of clinical research, hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding, has shown time and time again what works: Behavioral Parent Training.

It's not perfect. No therapy is. But meta-analyses consistently show Behavioral Parent Training improves aggression, outbursts, and refusal to complete routines or daily tasks significantly more than other therapies in children 2–10 years old.

So why haven't you heard of it? Here's the ugly truth. Most therapists and psychologists are not trained in Behavioral Parent Training, and many have never heard of it themselves. It's a huge shame, and something I'm passionate about changing.

To be clear about who this is for: when we talk about behavioral challenges, we're not referring to standard, normative child behavior, which, yes, includes challenges. It's the children with intense challenges that cause significant impairment in their everyday lives. Home, school, and/or extracurriculars detrimentally impacted.

The outbursts, anger, and meltdowns. Being kicked out of sports, preschools, and daycares. Avoiding the store or restaurants. I've seen this every day in my decade in this field.

An hour a week one-on-one with a therapist helps a lot of children with anxiety, panic, depression, trauma, or social skills challenges. But aggression, explosiveness, defiance, and endless screaming and conflict are different. The research is clear: an hour a week does not tend to improve the problem in full, and certainly not quickly. How could it? It can take years to see improvement if you, the parent, don't know what to do at home.

The focus is on you. Not because it's your fault, but because you are the solution. The agent of change. The one who will make a difference.

That's the gap Behavioral Parent Training closes. Not more sessions. The right sessions, teaching you the specific skills the research says work. So you're not waiting years to find out if therapy is helping.

Decades of research, funded by taxpayers, sitting in journals that aren't free or accessible outside a university. And I used to be one of them. I left my research professor position to get this knowledge out of the journals and into your living room.

Thanks for trusting me with your family.

P.S. Don't forget to practice observing the ABCs of behavior. Parent Steps, my Behavioral Parent Training program, Step #2 will be posted this Sunday.

If you're reading this, you've probably already tried a dozen things to get your child to listen. Sticker charts. Time-outs. Long conversations about "using your words." Maybe some of it worked for a few days. Then it stopped.

I want to tell you something that might be a relief: it's very possible none of that failed because you did something wrong. It's possible it failed because of the order things happened in. Before we can change a behavior, we have to actually understand the pattern driving it.

That's where we're starting. Not with a fix. Not with changing everything at once. Instead, with one week's worth of observations. Understanding the reinforcement patterns you get into with your child will teach you how to change one thing at a time to improve negative behavior and maintain positive behaviors. But first, we have to understand the pattern. That's where the ABCs of behavior come in.

The ABCs of Behavior

In psychology, we look at behavior as a three-part sequence.

A – Antecedent. What happened right before the behavior. Think of this as the trigger. It could be an instruction, a transition, a sibling interaction, anything that sets the stage for your child's behavior.

B – Behavior. What your child actually did, or didn't do. This can be something they said, something they did physically, or simply something they did not do.

C – Consequence. What happened right after. This isn't just punishment. A consequence is anything that follows the behavior, including your reaction, whether you'd consider it "good" or "bad."

The key to understanding the ABCs is this: to keep a desirable behavior or reduce one you don't want, you, as the parent, have to change either the antecedent or the consequence, or both. That adjustment is what meaningfully shifts the dynamic between you and your child. If we don't know the actual sequence playing out in your home, we can't know how to adjust it in a way that works.

An Example

Antecedent: You tell your child to put their shoes on. Behavior: They yell, complain, and refuse. Consequence: You repeat yourself, louder, a few times.

Nothing about this makes you a bad parent. This is an incredibly common sequence. By identifying it, we can begin to see a few things: this specific scenario causes frequent frustration, you often have to repeat yourself, and depending on what happens next, your child may not comply with this request going forward.

You can't change a pattern you haven't clearly identified yet. That's where we start.

Your One Job This Week: Just Watch

I know it's tempting to want to jump straight to fixing things, or to label your reactions or your child's behavior as "good" or "bad." Please resist that urge for a week. It's the single biggest reason parenting strategies fail. Trying to change everything at once, before understanding what's actually happening, sets you up to feel like nothing works.

This week, your only job is to notice. Don't judge it, don't try to change it yet. Just watch for the ABC pattern in one or two behaviors that are hard in your house right now. Write it down if that helps you see it more clearly.

Next week, we make our first, and most research-backed, change: how to use your attention to actually shift behavior. It's a small shift with a surprisingly big effect, and it's the foundation everything else in this series builds on.