Distraction: The Method Of Achieving Discipline In Children

Distraction  is a method that generally works as a good tool for behavior control. By diverting a child’s interests and attention, you can help avoid situations that could have led to unwanted behavior.

Distraction is an effective strategy when parents believe that their child’s behavior may become problematic. For example, it is useful when the child becomes irritable, when they sit still for too long at a time, or when they perform an activity that is difficult for them.

The distraction method is easy to use. In fact, you may just need to point out something interesting or special, start a simple game that requires concentration, or play with simple things. Basically, you can choose anything that will distract and entertain the child. It’s all about avoiding or stopping a possible bad behavior.

Keys to using distraction

As we have mentioned above, it is quite simple to apply the distraction method. Especially if we keep in mind that children’s behavior is often governed by what is happening around them. Their frontal lobe is not fully developed yet, which means they still cannot control their attention as adults can. And it’s something parents can benefit from.

To be able to do this, you need to consider the following aspects:

• The child should have an alternative to the activity or stimuli that may initiate bad behavior. Introduce a new activity, a toy, a game or teach them something new with the things they already have. Be creative!
• Change the surroundings. Take the child to a place where you are not usually. Or take the child to a whole new place so they can get new perspectives.

• Make sure you have a number of resources ready for the moments when it may be difficult for the child.

Now let’s say you’re working with older kids with behavioral difficulties. In such cases, you can use other strategies such as:

• Change the content of the conversation.
• Suggest a simple game or activity. Make sure it is interesting enough to capture the child’s attention.
• Suggest different alternative activities that the child can perform when he or she feels overwhelmed or blocked. Make sure the activity helps the child out of a frustrating situation.

Distraction and redirection

Distraction is a corrective method related to redirection. Redirection involves focusing the child’s attention on a harmless activity or stimulus.

Indirectly, distraction means that you reevaluate activities that interest us in being able to use them as a source of good behavior. With them, we can reward children and strengthen their self-esteem. In other words, we put the children in a situation where it is easy for them to gain strength.

Be careful about reinforcing negative behaviors with distraction

There is something we all need to be aware of if we want to use distraction to raise children. If you suggest a fun and rewarding activity after the child has hurt someone else or has had a tantrum, then you end up rewarding the bad behavior.

It is best to use the method to prevent bad behavior. That way, you have many more alternatives.

You should also keep in mind that this method is not appropriate in all cases. For example, there may come a time when you do not want to prevent a tantrum because you want to teach the child that their behavior is wrong. Therefore, it is important that you evaluate the use of this method before applying it.

In that sense, the ideal thing to do is to combine different educational and disciplining strategies intelligently. This will ensure that your intervention is fruitful regardless of the context.

Be knowledgeable about it: The more disciplinary tools you are familiar with, the better. But keep in mind, the more you lean up disciplinary methods, the less effective they become.

In addition, pay close attention to the child’s reaction when using distraction. Also, do not forget to be as consistent as possible in this context. However, you still need to be flexible and be able to use other methods if this does not work as expected.

The distraction method as an alternative to corporal punishment

E. Gershoff published a study in 2010 in which he explained that a lot of the research on discipline was mostly focused on parents’ use of corporal punishment. This is probably because corporal punishment is a very controversial way of raising children.

However, corporal punishment is one of the many disciplinary techniques that parents use to try to eradicate their children’s bad behavior. We are not saying that all parents in the world take advantage of this. Some use it daily and fortunately others are completely against it.

Furthermore, a 2007 study analyzed 10 different disciplinary tactics often used by parents. It resulted in results that were not expected. Physical punishment was actually one of the three least used methods. The most commonly used method was to control the child’s behavior, talk to the child, distraction and modeling.

Distraction can be a useful tool to avoid resorting to more violent ways of discipline, such as shouting or punishing. Distraction can help raise children in a healthy way.