Julia’s blog from yesterday got me thinking about what I would do with a daughter who chronically steals and whether or not this behavior is attention-getting and done “purposefully”. Rachel, one of our precious readers, commented that her daughter doesn’t have the cause and effect thinking to be purposefully trying to be more difficult and grab more attention. I think this is true for LuLu as well. The difficult behaviors stem mostly from a lack of impulse control and an inability to reason out a different way of doing things.

Our natural tendency as parents is to look for something WE can do that will affect our children’s behaviors. And we continuously revert back to traditional parenting techniques and are bewildered when our children don’t respond the way the vast majority of children on the planet would respond...negative consequences are supposed to extinguish behaviors.

With LuLu, this is rarely true. And our situation last night (which I’ll get to later) is proof of this...again.

So, as I thought about Julia’s daughter (and it’s so much easier to be the armchair quarterback than it is to think of these things while actually parenting), I was reminded that “prescribing the behavior” often works for us.

Prescribing the behavior is basically telling the child that you expect them to respond in that negative way, and in essence giving them permission to do so. (Sounds crazy; but it works.) I’ve found that if LuLu is stuck in a truly oppositional place, giving her permission to do all the negative things I can think of that she’s likely to do really throws her off. Her drive to be oppositional is often so strong that she’s unable to do all these negative things, because then she wouldn’t be oppositional...she’d be doing what I just told her to do. (See, I told you it sounds crazy...but because of the nature of the way oppositional thoughts get stuck in our children’s brains, it works). The key is that once you’ve prescribed the behavior, even if they do it, you have to accept it...after all, you’ve just told them you were expecting them to do it.

The other way that prescribing the behavior works for LuLu is that it gives her a chance to “see” cause and effect. In situations where she’s not “stuck” in opposition, it gives her an opportunity to think through why the behavior I’ve prescribed would be a bad response. This has only started happening recently. For example, if we’re in a situation where I know she’s likely to escalate to a meltdown, because there’s a sudden change in plans or unexpected occurrence, I’ll prescribe the meltdown, saying something like, “I know you’re going to be upset about this change, so go ahead and start grunting, kicking, cussing or doing whatever you need to do to meltdown.” More often these days, she’s able to respond with “I will not!” And for a brief moment, she processes and understands that this would be an inappropriate behavior. Something about prescribing the behavior gives her frontal cortex an opportunity to kick in and take a bit of control.

Our situation last night: Things became rather dire around here when LuLu would not/could not go to sleep. Her stomach discomfort, anxiety/excitement about being here and all the other emotions tied up in this trip reached a peak last night. Super Dad and I both were counting on her dosing off at her usual bedtime, so we could get done some of the work-related things we hadn’t been able to do all day. She continued to chatter and complain about her stomach until after midnight, even in a pitch-black room where we were all trying to sleep.

What happened next was an example of exhausted parents behaving badly, because we did start yelling at her. (How many times do we have to do that before we understand that it doesn’t work? In fact, it doesn’t even help US feel better.) It’s just that LuLu’s mixture of issues causes such bizarre and unreasonable behaviors. For example, her stomach is bothering her a great deal, so instead of saying that, she complains that she’s hungry...chronically (even while she’s eating). So her cries for hunger at midnight were frustrating, especially since we’d given her all the medications the specialists have prescribed to help with these issues.

Our frustration only served to escalate her (as usual). And this only served to escalate us. We started thinking of our “escape plan”...which is why I hate traveling with LuLu on family emergencies; because there are no good escape plans. Could I really hop in the car at midnight with a raging child and start driving toward Atlanta? Would it even be feasible to think about leaving her with Super Dad today to handle on his own while I go back to Atlanta as originally planned? How could we get out of this situation once and for all? Our tired brains trying to apply some sense of logic and reason to the situation only got more frustrated. And her behaviors seemed so purposeful, designed just to tick us off.

Finally...and I still don’t know what made me do it...I just crawled in bed next to her, completely hugging her. Almost immediately, I felt her body relax and she was asleep within a very short time...and so was I. I don’t know what made me decide this was the best tactic, and I also don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. It was the true antithesis to what I WANTED to do or what my logical mind THOUGHT would work in this situation. I so wanted her just to stop her negative behaviors and go to sleep.

I feel a bit foolish this morning, in hindsight, that I didn’t think of this response sooner. But that’s what I mean about the armchair quarterbacking. It’s easier to analyze the play when you’re not in the middle of it. Especially when the rules of this game are so counter-intuitive to every “normal” parenting maneuver there is.

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