How Our Thoughts And Actions Affect Our Children’s Behaviour.

When children misbehave, it is pretty natural to feel negative and you may find yourself behaving in a negative way back, by shouting or putting them down, withdrawing affection or some other method of making children feel bad about what they have done. This is because their negative behaviour attracts a negative response from us, unless, we are aware of how it is making their behaviour worse and try hard to stay in a more positive mindset.

As parents who are trying to improve children’s behaviour, remembering that your negative behaviour will also attract a negative response, can really help you to stay positive and non reactive, so that you are more likely to get a positive response from your children.

James Allen in his classic book “As a Man Thinketh”, explains this theory really well.

He likened our minds to that of a garden. He said that we can “intelligently cultivate” a garden by planting useful seeds and helping it blossom, or we can leave the garden to grow wild and let an abundance of useless weeds take over.

He believed negative thoughts were like weeds and very destructive, while positive thoughts can be planted like seeds to grow and develop into beautiful things.

So by thinking of your child’s mind as a garden that needs to be carefully cultivated and filled with good seeds and know that negative actions are destructive and fill the mind like weeds in a garden it can help to see the reason behind using positive methods to improve children’s behaviour.

The bottom line is, by helping a child to feel good about their self, you attract good behaviour, and if a child is made to feel bad about their self you attract unwanted behaviour.

So next time you feel yourself getting annoyed with your children, and they are misbehaving, check to see if you are saying or doing negative things which will be making the situation worse. You can turn things around by saying more positive things and acting in a more positive way, even if this starts with calming down and getting yourself in a more positive mindset first.

For example,

If you asked a four year old to get dressed for school and 5 minutes later you see that they have not even started, it can be a natural reaction to think negative about this and respond by saying something negative, such as,

'Why can't I trust you to get dressed when I ask you, you are always wasting time and making me late for work'. .......and so on. Although a child may respond and get dressed, it is not going to put them into any kind of good mood, which will likely mean more negative behaviour later on.

If we turn our thoughts into positive ones, we might say something encouraging and positive, for example,

'Come on it's time to get dressed, you are really good at getting dressed, show me how quick you can get dressed and see if you can beat me to the kitchen for breakfast, ... This is much more positive and likely to put them into a good mood and want to please you by getting dressed.

So remember GOOD thoughts and actions produce good results
BAD thoughts and actions produce bad results
By Ruth Edensor