Encouraging good behaviour or habits

• Help with difficult behaviour and negative emotions. Videos narrated by celebrities cover expert advice on limiting conflict, keeping calm when your kids act up, getting your child to follow instructions and much more. Highly recommended.
• Tried and trusted top tips on encouraging good behaviour from this excellent Australian parenting site.
• Taming tantrums and managing meltdowns from the respected US charity Understood.org
• Advice on handling difficult behaviour and what might be causing it. 
• Challenging behaviour – read advice from the Royal College of Psychiatrists
• “Should I be worried?” supportive, common sense tips on what’s normal from the MindEd website. 
• Family Lives topics include “pester power”, sibling rivalry, coping with challenging behaviour and how to use positive discipline.
• Why older kids might still be having tantrums 
• Seven ideas for using rewards and consequences
  
  

Fun books for children

• Rude Mule by Pamela Edwards. A hilarious story about a very rude mule coming to tea- you have to teach him some manners!
• What to Do When Bad habits take Hold- A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Nail-biting and more by Dawn Huebner. A great book to help children overcome habits that they find annoying or embarrassing like thumb sucking, nail-biting, hair twirling or anything else. 
• What to Do if you Grumble too much – a Kids’ Guide to Overcoming Negativityby Dawn Huebner

Tips for encouraging good behaviour or habits 

• Rewards systems. Although all parents probably use punishment or threats at times, they are often not helpful because they tend to make children more worried and angry. If there is a behaviour you want to encourage or a habit to overcome, a rewards system can often be much more successful. If you and your child decide to use a reward system of some kind there are some really good tips on how to make that work best. The younger the child, the more immediate the reward should be, to link it directly to the behaviour you are rewarding. For a 3-year-old the reward needs to be straight away, for a 5-year-old no later than the same or the next day, for 7 year old it would be OK to have a reward at the end of the week. Decide on the reward together if your child is old enough. It could be something you do together or a treat with a friend- it doesn’t have to be a present, sweets or money.
• Reward partial success. Very important! That means, for example, you don’t only reward a night where your child didn’t creep into your bed, you also reward a night where your child crept into your bed only once, or came in twice but went back to their own bed. This is absolutely key as it makes success more likely. Set the bar at a level that you think is achievable.
• Rewards systems can work even for problems where the child isn’t necessarily in control! e.g. bedwetting. It seems that they can work subconsciously. Again reward partial success and don’t dwell on times when it goes wrong.