Planning ahead

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Why planning helps

Shopping trips, travelling in the car, taking telephone calls, attending appointments for yourself, visiting friends – these are all times when it is challenging to meet your child’s needs and achieve what you need to do as well. You can think of these as ‘high-risk parenting situations’ – times when there is a risk of difficult behaviour from your child and frustration, stress or anger on your part. What follows is a description of a strategy that families can use for these especially challenging situations.

High-risk parenting situations have one or more of the following characteristics:

• Competing demands: this is when parents are trying to care for their child as well as trying to achieve something – like talking to a bank teller, talking on the phone, driving a car, going shopping, having a meal with friends.
• Time pressures: it can be very difficult when parents have deadlines to meet and times when they need to be places. Young children do not share the same understanding or motivation about time requirements as adults do. Examples of time pressures include getting ready in the morning for school and work, making it to an appointment on time, getting ready for bed and so on.
• Environments that are boring for children: many places and situations are not well designed for children, and they get bored quickly. Examples are travelling in the car, sitting around in waiting rooms, standing in queues, going grocery shopping. Boredom is not always a bad thing. Children need opportunities to solve their own boredom. In fact, boredom can be an important impetus for creativity and a few suggestions from you can help children think of ways to relieve the boredom themselves. However, in situations where the options available to children are very limited, or when difficult behaviour is likely to be particularly challenging and stressful, it can pay to take a more active role in helping to prevent boredom.

Planned activities

Two Australian psychologists, Professor Matthew Sanders and Professor Mark Dadds, developed and evaluated what they called ‘Planned Activity Routines’ to help parents deal with high-risk parenting situations. These are based on a number of simple principles:

• Plan ahead to prevent problems arising.
• Teach children how to cope effectively with the demands of the situation.
• Find ways to help children stay engaged, busy and active when they might otherwise become bored or disruptive.

These are the steps to developing a Planned Activities Routine for your child in a high-risk parenting situation.

Identify the high-risk parenting situation
Make expectations clear
Think of your child as a ‘learner’
Plan ways of helping your child keep busy and engaged
Encourage good behaviour
Implement consequences for behaviour you don’t like
Have a follow-up discussion

Before you can plan, you need to identify situations that are high risk for you. Times when you have felt stressed, frustrated or embarrassed by your child’s behaviour might indicate a high-risk parenting situation. Work out what is making the situation difficult. Is it too many competing demands, time pressures or an environment that is boring? Or is it an environment that seems custom-made to provoke difficult behaviour from your child (for example, checkouts with lollies and toys at a child’s eye level!)?

It’s also worth working out what is practical for you and your child in a given situation. Can the activity be avoided in the first place? Would it be possible to have someone help? Would that make a difference? If the situation cannot be avoided, or if you think there is value in your child learning how to cope better in the situation, then developing a Planned Activities Routine may be a strategy that will help.

Hold a discussion with your child well before you enter a high-risk parenting situation. It helps both of you to be clear about what you expect from the situation.

With younger children it may be less confusing and frustrating for both of you if you simply say in simple terms what your expectations are. As children get older they will be able to contribute ideas, so work together to develop a small number of specific rules. With older children, this step is more of a negotiation. As the parent you retain the final word on what you are prepared to agree to.

Effective rules remind your child of what is expected and remind you of what to look for and respond to. For example, rules for a doctor’s waiting room might include, ‘Talk quietly’, ‘Ask before you touch’, ‘Be gentle with the toys and magazines’ and ‘Play on the floor next to me’.

It's also a good idea to agree in advance on what happens when the rules are followed and when they are broken. For example, for the doctor’s waiting room you might say, ‘If you stay close to me and ask before you touch, you can play with the toys or read the books. If you forget to stay close or touch without asking, you will sit on the chair next to me for one minute’. Check that your child understands by asking him to explain the rules and the consequences to you. Do this again just before you enter the high-risk situation (for example, just before you go through the door of the doctor’s surgery).

‘Difficult behaviour’ can arise because a child does not yet have the skills to cope with a situation. Ask yourself what you can do to help your child learn what to do in high-risk situations. Here are some suggestions:

• Reduce stress on your child while he is learning. Just as you would not put a brand new learner driver onto a busy inner city street on their first lesson, help your child learn a new skill easily. Think about what you can do to decrease stress on your child in a new situation and give him lots of practice coping in easier situations. Give him lots of opportunities to experience success while learning a new skill. Once he is coping better, he can graduate to a more challenging situation. Here are some examples:
  

  Tips for dealing with high-stress situations
  High-risk situation	Building in success opportunities
  shopping	plan a few short shopping trips for just a few items
  visiting/visitors	arrange a series of short visits from/to a friend or relative
  telephone calls	arrange a series of short telephone calls

• Think about when your child is likely to be at his best. Ensuring that your child is not hungry or tired is one way of helping him cope with a demanding situation. Sometimes children will not even realise they are hungry or tired, but will just feel irritable. If it’s possible, plan the high-risk situation around your child’s routine.
  
• Work out what skills your child needs to learn. For example, if problems occur during phone calls, he might need to learn how to say ‘excuse me’, how to wait for you to respond, how to accept your answer and how to keep busy and quiet while you are talking to the person on the phone. These are things you could talk about. You could also show your child how to do these things, and praise him when he does them.

For very young children, plan some activities that will keep your child busy and active in the high-risk parenting situation. In a café you could help your toddler start their chosen activity – drawing or playing with an activity book. Help an older child plan for himself some interesting and engaging activities for the high-risk situation. You can help even further; for example, while grocery shopping you might ask him to find particular items on the shelves and put them in the trolley, or to identify colours or words on labels. When queuing at the post office, you could play a quiet game of ‘I spy’ or 'Who am I?’ You can have special activities just for car trips. Have a few ideas or activities up your sleeve so that you can offer them to help your child avoid getting bored and becoming disruptive.

During a high-risk situation, notice your child following the rules and identify and encourage behaviour you like. Avoid the trap of responding only to behaviour you don’t like. Instead, take the time to interrupt what you are doing every now and then to observe your child, and let him know when you like what he is doing. For example, during a shopping trip you might praise him for staying close, speaking in a quiet voice and helping you find things. If the high-risk situation is a telephone call, you might briefly interrupt the conversation to praise your child for playing quietly.

When it comes to managing difficult behaviour in high-risk parenting situations, prevention is better than cure. Successfully implementing the previous steps will reduce the likelihood of your child playing up. Nevertheless, it’s best to plan ahead of time for what you will do if the problem behaviour does occur.

Knowing what you will do ahead of time is important for a number of reasons. First, it can be difficult to implement a consequence when difficult behaviour happens in some place other than your own home. Second, a difficult situation can become even more stressful when you are trying to decide what to do in the heat of the moment. Stress, embarrassment or shame can all contribute to you feeling out of control or losing your temper.

Fortunately, most consequences that you would use at home for problem behaviour can be used elsewhere with some modifications. For example, if you are using a consequence such as time-out at home, you might be able to adapt it to shopping trips by requiring that your child sit still beside you for a specified period of time on a seat outside the supermarket, or sitting with him in the car (never leave a child alone in a car).

It can be helpful to have a discussion with your child following the high-risk situation. During the discussion highlight things he did well, and celebrate the progress you are making together. You might also point out one or two things your child might do differently in future. These can become your goals for next time.

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