Picking/choosing your battles

As a follow up and conclusion to the two previous blog posts, this blog post is Part 3 of 3 in a short mini-series of Strategies to help with behaviors.

While the strategies presented in the 2 prior blog posts can be used in multiple situations and scenarios to help decrease unwanted behavior. We realize that the circumstances don’t always allow for this. Sometimes you as a parent or guardian are having a bad day, or are tired and while you want to be firm with boundaries, sometimes you can’t. It is understood that even with the best intentions, we all have bad days. While we may want to follow through with something we may be more inclined to give in to a child to prevent a scene or to decrease our own frustration.

In these situations, we need to do our best to stay consistent, but also, we need to pick our battles. Maybe we know that when we take our child shopping on the weekend, it is very crowded. Therefore, we are more likely to give in if a child asks for candy to prevent them from having a meltdown and making a scene. Or maybe we personally have had a tough day, so we have a lower tolerance for dealing with behavior. In this situation, we may give in to our child to prevent ourselves from having our own meltdown. That’s ok if it happens occasionally; we can’t expect ourselves to get it right all the time. Pick your battles, and more importantly – don’t feel bad when you have to do this.