One of my favorite ways to talk about your behavioral relationship with you children is to relate it to a bank account that houses positive interactions.

These positive interactions are the number one currency when it comes to developing relationships and managing our children's challenging behavior.

Every time you engage positively with your child, you make a deposit into this account. Conversely, every time you have to give your child feedback or deliver a reprimand, this counts as a withdrawal.

The more genuine and impactful the positive interaction, the bigger the deposit. The more harsh and negative the reprimand, the bigger the withdrawal.

It must be our goal as parents to work to keep our behavioral bank account balance in the positive because this is the currency with which we need to use to address challenging behavior.

If we attempt to make a withdrawal where there is nothing left in the account, the debt starts to build and our children...

When I started college, I wanted to become a pharmacist. I always had a fascination with the sciences and loved exploring the cause and effect nature of the world. I also had a strong motivation to have the nicest car in the parking lot and it seemed every time I would pull into our local Walgreens, that car would belong to the pharmacist. What I quickly came to realize as I entered my second semester in college is that my love for science did not over ride my strong dislike for math and I began to question my chosen field of study. During this same semester I was enrolled in your classic Psych 101 course and got introduced to the basics of behaviorism. What I learned in that class forever changed the trajectory of my life.

Although behaviorism is nestled in with the rest of psychology, it is actually a science that looks at variables and draws conclusions based on data. In short it can be summarized as the science of learning.  Since the early 20th century, behavior...

Do you understand the basic concepts of reinforcement, have had some short term success controlling challenging behavior with a system but wish your child would simply listen without having to leverage stickers and prizes all the time?

That's a big heck yes for me and nearly every parent group we work with!

We know that using reinforcement works; however, we also know that it takes work to do it right and we don't want to rely on using it forever.

Whenever I work with families on setting up positive reinforcement systems in their home, I start with the end in mind by making sure that parents are PAIRING themselves with the external symbols of reinforcement they are delivering to their children.

The term PAIRING is commonly used in ABA to describe the process of associating yourself with a preferred item or activity so that YOUR words and presence become reinforcing without the extra prizes.

Three ways to pair with your child are…

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