Dr. Steven P. Shelov: Off the screen, so what do you use? Well there have been a number of techniques and approaches mainly around the issue of limit setting of, occasionally your withdrawing a child to place in a place with no stimulation for a certain amount of time, not a long time but a certain amount of time, usually if you take three years of age, three minutes, four years, four minutes, something like that, where they are not going to do TV and they are not going to have any kind of the stimulus.
Speaker: It is more of like a time out, exactly?
Dr. Steven P. Shelov: Yeah and time outs are not easy either. And the key is in a young child, distraction works. And also avoiding the situations that the child you know is going to be difficult. If you have a really difficult child who is in a difficult period at two, let's say, you don't take them to places where they have the potential to act out whether it's a supermarket or whether it's public spaces, you just try and figure out ways around that or do it at times when they are not so crowded or other things modified. So avoiding situations where a child is likely to act out is the first step, that's a prevention. Second is using techniques that make the child understand that that behavior is not acceptable and if you have to withdraw the child into a quite room or a quite place for a couple of minutes in order to reinforce that and then there is the need sometimes to not reward, very definitely not to reward when that behavior happens and be very conscious of doing that and not giving mixed messages about rewarding things when the behavior has been outrageous.
So those are the kind of mixes of behavioral interventions. Hitting doesn't work. No matter what people think, it may make your frustration go away for a moment but very quickly after the composed hit, they feel bad. Because it doesn't feel good to hit your child and it certainly doesn't feel good to be hit.
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