THE KAZDIN METHOD FOR PARENTING THE DEFIANT CHILD by Alan E. Kazdin

• As long as you are committed to systematically taking this approach to changing the behavior of your child, even an imperfect and partial application of the method produces results.
• When you commit to positively reinforcing the behavior you want, you can be kinder to your child while being more systematic.
• Positive reinforcement tends to calm a household because it offers clear, attainable objectives for parents and children alike to aim for in shaping behavior.
• Research must go hand in hand with dissemination if it’s going to help people.
• But the research shows us that more intense punishment does not lead to greater change in behavior. If you are giving more and longer timeouts, it means your strategy is failing.
• If you’re giving more and longer time-outs, this should tell you that you need to do more to positively reinforce good behaviors to replace the unwanted behaviors.
• Kids are people, and people respond to the method of positive reinforcement this book teaches; it works.
• Heed the natural urge to hug your kid, and heed it often: it’s one of the best things you can do as a parent.
• But when it comes to shaping and changing a child’s behavior, what comes most easily and naturally to parents is often the opposite of what works best.
• We concentrate so intensely on the behavior we want to eliminate that we forget to praise and reinforce the behavior we do want.
• Myth 1. Punishment will change bad behavior.
• Punishment can have its uses, as we’ll discuss in later chapters, but study after study has proven that punishment all by itself, as it is usually practiced in the home, is relatively ineffective in changing behavior.
• Why? Because it does not teach a child what to do, nor does it reward the desired behavior—which is the only effective way to get the child to do it.
• Your child’s resistance to punishment escalates as fast as the severity of the punishment does, or even faster.
• punishing changes parents’ behavior for the worse more effectively than it changes children’s behavior for the better.
• Modeling is a very strong way to teach behavior, stronger than punishment, which helps explain why the harm you do with harsh punishments can multiply and last a long time.
• Myth 2. More reminders lead to better behavior.
• In fact, studies show clearly that saying it fifty times is usually less effective than saying it once or twice.
• Nagging makes the desired behavior less likely to occur.
• The sequence is clear: antecedent (please clean your room) leads to behavior (cleaning the room) leads to consequence (reward for cleaning the room).
• It’s easy to remember: ABC.   A for antecedent B for behavior C for consequence
• Requests or instructions lose their effect if they don’t lead directly to the rest of the sequence.
• Myth 3. Explaining to your child why a behavior is wrong will lead him or her to stop that behavior.
• Explanation is wonderful for building IQ, for developing a child’s powers of rational reasoning, and for teaching the difference between right and wrong.
• The most effective way to teach a general principle like “It’s not right to take from others” is not just to preach it in the abstract but also to reinforce your child’s good behavior in specific situations in which he chooses not to take from others.
• verbal instructions have proven to be one of the weakest interventions in changing behavior.
• An antecedent without consequences doesn’t do much to change behavior.
• Myth 4. Lots of praise just spoils your child.
• Praise is one of the strongest ways to influence your child’s actions.
• Most parents do not, in fact, praise their children’s behavior too much, even if they think they do.
• A lot of very good research tells us that praise, properly used, is one of your most reliable tools in changing your child’s behavior.
• Myth 5. Doing it once or twice means your child can do it regularly.
• The term for this kind of purposeful repetition of behavior and reward is “positive reinforcement.” Nothing is more crucial to helping a child master a behavior and perform it reliably over time.
• Myth 6. My other child did not need special training or a program, so this child shouldn’t need them, either.
• Your different children may well require different kinds of training, as do we all.
• Myth 7. My child is just being manipulative.
• Calling a child manipulative often substitutes for recognizing that we may have reinforced the wrong behaviors in that child.
• Adults shape the behavior of children in their responses to it.
• The training of children is never over. It’s never too late.
• Instead of thinking of your child’s behavior in terms of what you don’t want—He has too many tantrums or It drives me crazy when she doesn’t listen—start thinking in terms of the behavior you do want.
• It’s much easier to build up a behavior you want by positively rewarding it than it is to wipe out a behavior you don’t want via punishment or other negative means.
• When you get rid of a behavior by rewarding its opposite, the effects are stronger, last longer, and do not have the undesirable side effects of punishment.
• When you consistently connect a behavior to rewards, that’s “positive reinforcement,” one of your most basic and powerful tools.
• Positive reinforcement should be as consistent and as immediate as possible, directly following the desired behavior and clearly connected to it.
• Reinforced” means that when the child performs the behavior, you notice and reward it with positive reinforcement.
• “Practice” means that the child has many repeated opportunities to do the behavior right and to be rewarded for it.
• You shape a complex behavior by breaking it up into doable steps and then reinforcing each step until you build up to the bigger accomplishment.
• You extinguish a behavior when you don’t give your attention to it, like removing oxygen and fuel from a fire.
• A for antecedent—everything that comes before a behavior, including the way you model behavior for your child, the instructions you give, the prompts you offer to guide your child, and the context that sets up the behavior.
• B for behavior—when you identify positive opposites, when you shape a behavior by breaking it down into doable steps, when you give your child repeated opportunities to do something right, you’re working on the behavior itself.
• C for consequences—what comes after the behavior, such as praise, attention, and other forms of reinforcement.
• Start by changing behavior, not by trying to get to the root causes of your child’s misbehavior.
• Studies show that reinforced practice, over time, actually changes the brain.
• Step 1: Starting a Point Chart
• The chart is just a way to track and prompt the process of doing the behavior and earning praise and other rewards. That process—reinforced practice in action—is what makes the program work.
• It’s much more important to do the program well than to do it all the time.
• The where matters, too. Where you place the chart can make a difference. Put it somewhere conspicuous, where everyone can see it, and see it often.
• It’s important for your child to see it often as well. It will motivate him or her to earn more rewards.
• Step 2: Buying Rewards
• Once you’ve set up the chart, you need to select some fun, appropriate rewards and set the terms for “buying” them with the points your child earns on the chart.
• First, do not take away. We absolutely do not want to take away anything Davey is “getting” now.
• Taking away an existing privilege would cause Davey to resent the program.
• We want to add new rewards, although it’s also fine to add more of a reward the child already receives.
• Begin with the small rewards.
• Candy and snacks can be used, but I recommend staying away from these.
• Price the rewards so that they are readily attainable.
• Timing matters. There must be little or no time delay between behavior and awarding points.
• The link between behavior and consequence has to be as short and as direct as possible. If it’s not, the program will probably fail, no matter how carefully you address every other aspect of it.
• A common problem with larger rewards requiring many points is that their delivery isn’t immediate.
• When developing behavior, especially early in the program, the emphasis should be on small rewards that can be earned daily.
• We want points and praise that are immediate, and we want rewards to be readily available.
• Step 3: Explaining the Program
• Experiencing the consistent connection between behavior and positive consequences, and experiencing it often, will establish the relationship in his actions, and that’s what counts.
• Step 4: Practice
• Remember, your practice routine won’t last forever—just a week or two, at most.
• Step 5: The Routine
• There are two kinds of antecedents that matter. One kind is called “prompts”—specific statements or actions aimed at getting a particular behavior to happen.
• But there’s another category of antecedents which is not specifically focused on the behavior but also comes before and helps set the stage for it, arranging the situation so it is conducive to the behavior and therefore makes it more likely to happen. These are called “setting-up events,” and they include things like establishing quiet time before getting to bed, or the routine of washing hands and setting the table before sitting down to a meal.
• The goal this first week is to start the program, not to perfect it.
• Don’t give him chance after chance, warning after warning.
• Attention from you is weaker than effective praise, but it is strong enough to keep a bad behavior going.
• Be sure to praise all that you saw that was good and was an improvement over past behavior.
• Praise what you saw that was good, praise the little steps along the way to the desired behavior, and praise whenever you give points. Remember that praise for the behaviors, all by itself, is pivotal, even if points are not earned.
• Success will require changes not only in your child’s behavior but, in all likelihood, also in your interactions with him or her.
• Praise is all-important.
• Praise is more important than points or anything else.
• Effective praise should include three components:   Enthusiastic verbal praise (with feeling, joy, and excitement: Great! Fantastic!) A very specific statement of exactly what your child did that you liked A gentle touch, like a pat on the shoulder or head, a hug, a high five, a smile, a thumbs-up or okay sign, to add a tangible nonverbal reward to the verbal praise
• or with only a little resistance, praise him. Give “clear and clean” praise. “Clear” means that you say exactly what he did that was good and you liked; be very specific. “Clean” means that you don’t caboose—you don’t add anything negative or judgmental to your praise at the end.
• Remember that adding other information to the praise dilutes the reinforcing effect of the praise.
• Always praise steps along the way to the good behavior.
• Think cheerleader-level enthusiasm—that’s what works best.
• When you praise, concentrate on the behavior, not the person.
• Make noncompliance a nonevent.
• Try to ignore your child if he does not comply with your request.
• Begin with “please.”
• When you ask your child to engage in the behaviors you want, begin with the word “please.”
• Please is a setting-up event that makes it more likely your child will comply, because it’s noncoercive and implies that she has a choice.
• The tone ought to be warm and gentle.
• A good rule of thumb is to anticipate compliance. Then you won’t feel anxious, and your voice will communicate that you do not expect to be in conflict.
• Don’t ask a question when you are instructing your child to do something.
• Be absolutely clear, explicit, and direct:
• An important part of the program is knowing and specifying exactly what you do want your child to do (the positive opposite of the behavior you don’t want).
• The challenge of our program is to catch your child doing the behavior you want and to reward that behavior—with praise, above all.
• And if you can’t catch it often enough because the behavior doesn’t occur often enough on its own, then you practice it.
• In framing a positive opposite, let’s try to use positive terms: what to do, rather than what not to do.
• Unpraised behavior is likely to drop out, so it’s critical to praise little steps, good tries, and almost-behaviors, even if they’re not enough to earn a point. Don’t be stingy about this.
• One more important note on rewards: fight the natural urge to be stingy with points.
• Remember, we’re shaping behavior here, and you should be looking for excuses to reward positive steps toward the desired outcome.
• Remember that the program is intended to be temporary, a dynamic process that you taper off until the behavior is a habit and you don’t need the structure of prompts and rewards around it.
• The main thing is to look for and praise any progress toward the behavior you want; look for any kind of success, and reward any steps along the way.
• Too often, parents begin with standards for behavior that are too stringent and unrealistic:
• Our basic rule of thumb, remember, is that we begin where he is—not with what we think he can do, but with what he does now.
• There’s no more effective way for a child to assert his independence than to shock you by expressing views contrary to yours on the subject of education and career.
• Even as you allow for the natural increase in risky behaviors, you have to decide what’s nonnegotiable and then be reliably consistent about enforcing the rules.
• Look for chances, also, to build or continue building your child’s competence—whether it’s in sports, music, cooking, or anything else.
• Pay attention, as a parent, to the difference between consistency and rigidity in your rules and actions. You want to be consistent, but you may have to compromise more.
• Paradoxically, your control and continuing influence will derive from your reasonableness and ability to compromise, so do not mistake these for weakness on your part.
• Walk away from battles and return at calmer times for negotiation.
• A guiding rule: Praise reasonableness whenever you encounter it.
• Praise without caboosing is still important, but tone down the gushing effusiveness you employed for praising younger children.
• Monitoring is crucial; the research shows clearly that less monitoring and supervision are associated with more risky behavior on the child’s part.
• Once an attitude is expressed as behavior, we can begin to change it.
• The next step is to set up a point system to reward the right behaviors.
• Reward the steps—which is what shaping is—and work toward the whole behavior:
• The basic principle here is to get the desired behavior any way you can, then ingrain it and refine it through reinforced practice.
• Praise, adjusted to the age group, is still the most important reward, and points and the goodies for which they’re cashed in are still secondary to praise.
• When in doubt, aim to get control over a smaller time period and extend it later.
• research shows that it’s relatively easier to extend a desired behavior to other situations once you achieve control in one situation.
• Having a messy room is an identifiable stage that tends to appear in adolescence and then go away.
• We’re always aiming to reinforce reasonableness and engagement with the family, and we’re also trying to meet a child’s evolving needs, which grow more complex over time.
• And, as I’ve said before, resist the urge to be stingy with points. The larger purpose of points and praise and the whole program is to reinforce good habits. Look for opportunities to do that, rather than for reasons not to award points.
• Parents should look for ways to give up control, and kids should look for ways to address their parents’ concerns.
• In general, when dealing with a preteen or teenager, you want to express interest in good behavior, attend to and reinforce reasonableness whenever he displays it, and give him autonomy and freedom in the safest possible way.
• Take opportunities to include the child in the family and to include yourself in your child’s world.
• Kids tend to mope a little and then act as if nothing ever happened, but parents tend to dwell on a conflict, replay it, and revisit their hurt feelings and anger.
• Parents usually believe that everything would be okay if they could somehow make their child see things from their point of view, but it’s a fantasy. Almost by definition, an adolescent can’t see a situation from her parents’ point of view, and vice versa: parents who think that they remember just what it was like to be an adolescent are fooling themselves.
• Rely on reinforced practice—not explanation—as the strongest method for changing behavior.
• Punishment is the only tool in many parents’ toolbox—and they reach for their toolbox only when they see their child’s behavior as in need of repair.
• Changing this mindset is one of our most important tasks.
• Punishment teaches what not to do. It does not teach what to do. Punishment suppresses the unwanted behavior for a moment, but the behavior resurfaces when the opportunity comes up again, since no positive behavior has been developed to replace it.
• research shows clearly that a one-minute time-out is sufficient for changing behavior and that we gain nothing but problems with much longer durations,
• Using physical power, shouting, and other forceful expressions of authority may oblige a child to comply, but only until the child can be away from the parent’s immediate control.
• the effect of punishment is immediate but transient.
• Parents feel that punishment is effective, when at best all it’s doing is briefly deferring the child’s bad behavior.
• Punishment ought to happen right away every time the unwanted behavior occurs, but the opposite is more often the case. The rewards for misbehavior are immediate, positively reinforcing that misbehavior, and the punishment is more delayed and therefore ineffective.
• One must eliminate the immediate reinforcer for the punished behavior, if possible, and that’s hard to do.
• Children tend to avoid interacting with a punishing agent—parents, teachers, whoever it might be—and to minimize the time they are obliged to spend with him or her. This is not good for your relationship to your child, especially if you depend heavily on punishment, and it will undermine even a well-designed program for changing behavior.
• By driving a wedge between parent and child, harsh and frequent punishment will reduce the effectiveness of that parent’s praise as a reward for good behavior.
• Physical punishment is likely to lead a child to display increased aggression against you or, more likely, his peers.
• Because punishment teaches a child what not to do but doesn’t teach what to do, any punishment should be combined with a reinforcement program that encourages a positive opposite or otherwise desirable behavior that competes with the unwanted behavior.
• The research shows that a mild punishment will be more effective than a severe one if the mild one is supported by positive reinforcement of a desirable behavior to replace the unwanted one.
• Punishment should be mild and brief.
• Parents’ standards tend to be much harsher than science’s when it comes to what qualifies as mild punishment.
• A brief time-out, a gentle reprimand, or even just a warning look qualifies, technically, as punishment. And often that’s all it takes, if properly employed.
• As a general rule, if your child is upset, crying, trembling, or startled by your punishment, it was not even close to mild. Take it down several notches.
• An effective time-out for a younger child should last no more than two to five minutes. More is not better, at least when it comes to the usefulness of the time-out in changing behavior.
• If you are taking away a privilege—use of a toy, a bike, a cell phone—then take it away for one day and no more.
• The important part is taking away the privilege right after the offense, not how long it stays taken away.
• Effective punishment will almost always be much milder than justice would seem to demand. It almost never matches the crime.
• Remember, the useful effect of punishment comes from the moment of taking away, not from adding more time after this initial moment.
• Do not punish when you are angry.
• Keep in mind that punishment is not vengeance.
• Being rational and calm models good behavior for your child. In fact, it teaches a lesson about behavior far more effectively than the punishment does.
• The way in which you respond to difficulty teaches your child how to respond to difficulty.
• If you have to teach a lesson, stick to the specifics: what your child did wrong, why it isn’t right. Reasoning with a child in the abstract—What if everybody did what you did?—isn’t going to do much good either.
• Do not use as a punishment task any activity that you wish to foster.
• The ratio of praise for the positive opposite behavior to punishment for the unwanted behavior should be very one-sided, like 5 to 1
• Manufacture practice opportunities for the desired behavior to occur so that you can reward it.
• Because reinforced practice is the key to changing behavior, creating more opportunities to do the behavior makes a big difference.
• If you are punishing the same behavior a few times a day for more than one day, stop and change the program.
• In a time-out, a child is withdrawn from reinforcers for a while, and that’s it.
• If you use time-out to encourage remorseful contemplation of crimes, or to give a child a break from an activity, or to distract him, you will almost certainly use it improperly.
• A time-out should be brief—certainly no more than ten minutes. Often, just a minute or two will do the trick, especially for very young children. It should happen immediately after the behavior that made it necessary. If you can, do it on the spot.
• The time-out needs to be directly connected to the behavior that necessitated it.
• Remember to praise compliance with the time-out: praise for going when asked, praise for sitting quietly, praise for completing the time-out properly.
• Do not threaten your child with a time-out: If you keep doing that you will get a time-out, This is your last chance, and so on. One warning is plenty.
• If you declare a time-out and your child folds his arms and says, No, I’m not going, and you can’t drag him, what do you do? First, give him an extra minute penalty. You can do this twice: up the time-out from two minutes to three, then to four. Then, if that doesn’t work, take away a privilege—something significant but brief, like no TV today. Then turn and walk away.
• Finally, I’ll say it one more time: research shows that the effectiveness of time-out depends on the effectiveness of time in—developing the positive opposite of the behavior that causes the time-out to happen in the first place.
• If the child goes to time-out either right away or when an additional minute has been added, you praise him for going to time-out.
• To make time-out work better with young children, we practice it in simulations.
• Often, the hardest part of changing behavior is getting the new behavior going at all so that you can reward it (or steps toward it) when you see it. That’s especially true when there is a sequence of actions that have to be done in order to achieve the desired outcome.
• Many of your child’s behaviors can be broken into steps and considered as similar sequences.
• The conventional parental wisdom, supported by bad advice from experts, is that it’s important to win every battle in order to win the war. But that’s not true.
• Be sure you can observe the behavior you want stopped, or can see clear signs that the behavior has occurred.
• Our research shows that when a child’s behavior improves, the parents’ levels of depression, anxiety, and stress go down, and families get along better.
• Remember, we want to establish consistency in behavior-reward connections.
• Here’s a rough rule of thumb to go by: if you say it twice (the initial instruction plus one reminder), that’s reminding; if you say it three or more times, you’re nagging, and nagging can undermine the program.
• Repeated reminders will not help the behavior to occur, and because each command that doesn’t lead to the desired behavior weakens the link between the antecedent (your prompt) and behavior and consequence, they can actually hurt by diminishing the power of your words to get behavior to happen.
• Prompted behavior must be reinforced with praise, and sometimes with other rewards as well.
• The most frequent culprit leading to program failure is a parent expecting too much of a desired behavior—for example, the child must do all of her homework, clean up all of her room, or behave well all day.
• Provide reinforcement for smaller steps along the way to the goal. Never demand perfection in performance.
• Occurrence of the behavior is directly proportional to the percentage of times you reinforce the behavior.
• The most important way to make changes endure is to do the program well in the first place.
• When you’re developing the behavior, it’s important to reinforce all or almost all instances of the behavior that you see. As the behavior develops, give the reinforcer for larger chunks of the behavior, so that there’s less direct connection between performing the behavior and getting the reward.
• Don’t insist on perfection, but you can build in a bonus for perfection.
• Distraction has its place and can be useful, but it does not teach the desirable behavior.
• In the case of predictable meltdowns, distraction is not likely to work. We have to teach new behaviors, and distraction techniques will never do that.
• More-stressed parents are less able to praise and more readily prone to punish and react negatively.
• Lowering chaos and related stress won’t solve your children’s behavior problems all by itself, but it will make you more effective in carrying out a program that will change their behavior, and it may give your children a stronger base upon which to build their relationship to you and their own sense of security and confidence.
• All households with children in them can feel chaotic at times.
• The research emphasizes instituting some select routines rather than trying to rigidly structure every facet of family life.
• Routines bring with them other positive attributes. For instance, they give individuals a special role.
• Routines can also provide a structure for specific behaviors.
• Children whose families have invested in good routines are more likely to approach their parents and seek them out in times of crisis or before a crisis arises.
• Technically, a “reward” is defined as something the child will like and value. A “reinforcer” is defined as a consequence that when given contingently (that means the child gets it if and only if he does the desired behavior) increases the likelihood of the child doing the behavior again in the future. There’s a large area of overlap between rewards and reinforcers, but not all rewards are reinforcers and not all reinforcers are rewards.
• Be skeptical about nutritional solutions to social, emotional, and behavioral problems.
• Instruct calmly.
• Simply modeling calmness when you talk about provocative issues will have the important effect of teaching your child how to handle difficult situations.
• You’re always teaching your child, even when you’re not trying to.
• Listen to your child.
• Solve problems together.
• Be generous with warm fuzzies.
• Physical contact is crucial for your child’s development, responsiveness to stress, learning, and more.
• Build competencies—more than one of them—at different points in childhood.
• Encourage social interaction, often under your supervision.
• resist the urge to referee when your child plays with other kids.
• Always know where your child is.
• Plan down time.
• Put value on quantity time.
• Quality time is nice, but it’s never a substitute for quantity time.
• One appealing thing about quantity time is that you don’t have to do anything special or have a scheduled activity: just arrange to be around together, to be available to each other and interact normally.
• Develop rituals and routines with your child.
• Connect the child to other family members, including those of different generations.
• Take care of yourself.
• Invest a little of your energy in yourself; it will pay off for your family.