By: Melinda Bennett

Have Fun Making New Friends: Plan with your child to make a friend party for two weeks from now as long as they make new friends to invite. Don’t allow your child to invite any old friends who are a bad influences over. They can play with toys or games. They can do a video game night or play Laser X. You could also include ice cream or pizza. This is a great way for you meet you child’s new friends and see if you now approve of their friends before taking more extreme measures. Afterwards be sure to help your child stay involved with their new friend group, if you approve of them, but always know what your child will be doing and where you child will be when they hang out with their new friends.

Don’t Allow the School to do a Reward System: Use frequent encouragement over rewards and praise. Teach the staff the difference between encouragement and praise and have them encourage the student throughout the day and send an encouraging note home. This will probably take sometime before it works.

Click on this to learn the difference between Praise and Encouragement

Tell the Reality: If your child wants to drink or runaway talk about realistic daily problems rather than scare tactics that are possible. Ask them if they runaway about all the good things they will give up at home like their own bedroom, food whenever they want it, or the ability to not get kicked out of the place they are living and the struggle to feel like they have ruined things so much they feel too ashamed to come home. If they want to drink get them help and talk to them about the emotional roller-coaster from drinking, throwing up, and feeling like they have to hide their problems from you and others because they will loose trust and how that would make them feel worse. Then you can talk about how they can have hope because there are people who can help them with their emotional pain if they will accept that help but the choice will ultimately have to be up to them.

Stop Nagging: When children won’t do homework or wash their clothes despite your repeated reminders stop nagging them. Let them make bad grades. Let them stink and run their friends away. At some point they will most likely decide on their own that they want better grades or to smell good. Nagging can encourage continuous negative behavior and create and never ending negative cycle.

Give Plenty of Love: Sometimes children act out because they need more hugs, I love you’s, or 1 on1 attention of both quantity and quality time. What is quality time to you may not be quality time to your child so discuss this before planning ideas.

Get Your Child Outside More: Go on frequent father son or daughter camping trips over the weekends, breaks, or summer. This can also include the whole family on some trips. This gives your child the opportunity to learn to self regulate and develop a healthy mind and body.

Buy a YMCA or Recreation Center membership for Your Family: This allows children to exercise, swim, and have something positive to do on a regular basis. This can help with children who spend too much time with friends on video games and electronics. This is also a good option for children who don’t do well on sports teams because of competitive anger issues, pride issues, or other problems. To make sure you use your pass regularly set a specific time to go each week (e.g. every Saturday morning).

Start over: When things go bad sometimes its best to talk about the problem and agree to start things over with your child. This is often good for anger issues, self harm issues, or being impulsive/ making bad decisions on the spot repeatedly in one day.