Here are our top tips for promoting positive behaviour with your child and how to react when your child says or does something you really wish they wouldn’t.

• Praise your child when they are behaving in ways that you want to encourage, being really specific with your praise.
• If you can see that they’re about to do something challenging, try to redirect them and distract them with something else before it gets to that.
• Keep your child stimulated at the right level, being under-stimulated can lead to boredom and challenging behaviour. But equally, being overstimulated can lead to challenging behaviour through overwhelm. Find a pattern to your days that keeps your children sufficiently stimulated, see our previous post on this.
• Role model the kinds of behaviours that you want to see.
• Set consistent age-appropriate expectations.
• Give children a warning before something needs to happen.
• Don’t do too many sedentary things, particularly not one after the other.
• Keep your focus on what you want your child to do rather than what you don’t want them to do.
• Help your child to learn about feelings and emotions – include naming feelings and emotions in your daily conversations and talk children through how you self-regulate.
• Try to teach your child the reason behind why they should do things rather than trying to get them to act a certain way either for a reward or to avoid a negative repercussion.