“Please understand me!”
A: It sounds like your son needs help understanding and communicating his needs, which means you need to figure out why your routines, bedtimes, and words are not working for him. There is probably something going on internally (emotionally, cognitively, or physically) that you can’t see, and he doesn’t know how to make sense of it. All he knows is that something feels wrong, and he doesn’t know how to express that. But he will try, and if his unskilled attempts to communicate are misinterpreted, ignored, or judged, he will get even more frustrated and resort to slapping, etc.
Reward charts may help to change his behavior, but they will add to his confusion and cause long-term damage. (To understand why the use of extrinsic rewards are just as damaging as punishments, see Alfie Kohn’s Punished By Rewards.)
In my PATH Parenting approach, the “T” stands for Trust. Trust is your pathway to power through understanding. And the understanding that will most empower you in this situation is that the human species is one of the most social creatures on earth. We are evolved for partnership, and I would venture to say that you can safely put your trust in a multi-million year process of natural selection. So if a child’s behavior seems antisocial, it’s NOT likely that the child is a new, mutant species! :) What’s most likely is that something in the child’s environment or experience has thrown a wrench into the works of his innate sociality.
Your impulse to gain understanding by sending me your question indicates that you are on the PATH to a mutually empowering relationship with your son! The next step is to dig deeper and figure out what’s derailing the partnership. This sort of detective work is often what I help parents do in coaching sessions, but you could also gain new understanding through books, talking with other partnership-oriented parents, and your own intuitive wisdom.
As soon as you and your husband stop focusing your efforts on behavior control and start demonstrating that you are sincerely (and confidently) interested in understanding his interior experience, he will begin to let down his defenses and start to feel some relief. You might even notice a profound shift and relaxation of his whole body, as if to say “FINALLY... The help I need has arrived!”
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