Behavior Management

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and Love and Logic Parenting are powerful, if different approaches to behavior management education. ABA is for children with severe behavior management needs. It examines problematic behaviors in isolation, discerns their causes and expected outcomes, then devises targeted solutions. Love and Logic Parenting is useful for children with more typical behavior management needs, and empowers them to make their own decisions and to own the consequences. Parents offer support and insight, but do not supersede their children’s ownership of problems and decisions. Though ABA and Love and Logic Parenting are different in methodology and utility, they have some important things in common: both are based on compassion and consistency. Both work.

Consider these examples:

ABA

A girl has been showing disruptive behavior in class. On several occasions, she has raised her voice, demonstrably upset. Instead of reacting angrily, or simply wishing that they understood her needs, her teachers make careful records of each incident, taking note of what happened immediately before and immediately after she exhibited the disruptive behavior. Her teachers discover that she is sensitive to loud noises. They teach her alternative methods, and she earns approval and rewards by reacting more calmly and appropriately, as she has been taught. Before long, she is adept at managing her reactions to the noise that once upset her.

Love & Logic Parenting

A boy forgets to bring his lunch to school. The boy’s father, instead of rearranging his schedule in order to deliver the boy’s lunch, allows him to miss lunch that day. That evening, they discuss what happened. Instead of expressing exasperation about the time he’d lost that morning and lecturing the child about the importance of responsibility, the father expresses empathy and solicits his son’s ideas for remembering in the future. Then and there, the boy decides to try leaving his lunch box on the kitchen table each evening as a reminder to himself.

Teaching children appropriate behavior and sound judgment is difficult for anybody. Children develop habits of doing things they should not do and of neglecting things they should. Routines such as bedtime, mealtime and doing homework can devolve into near-perpetual sources of headache and conflict at home, and can sap joy from the relationship, trapping families in a stagnant, frustrating situation. ABA and Love & Logic are tools to help children surmount significant obstacles in the development of self-control and to free up entire families to live richer, happier lives.