The Conscious Parent

good person. Please help me express my goodness. I don’t want to be
wild or defiant. This doesn’t feel good to me.”
I realize it’s difficult to hear this underlying plea when a child is
kicking, biting, screaming, drinking, or using drugs. Because such
extreme behavior frightens us, to look beneath the external manifestation
to a deeper place of understanding can be difficult. However, only when
we accept that our children act out because of an unmet emotional need
are we able to embark on a serious process of inquiry. Behavioral
shaping recognizes that the reason our children engage in troublesome
behavior isn’t that they are bad and need to be threatened with
punishment, but that they are good people who are experiencing difficult
emotions they haven’t yet learned to express in a contained manner.
Until the underlying emotion is addressed, the surface manifestations of
inappropriate behavior will continue. The more our children learn to
express their emotions directly in a contained way, the less they engage
in acting out. Emotional self-regulation is always the goal of behavioral
shaping.
I want to emphasize once again how crucial it is that behavioral
shaping is linked to your children’s level of maturity, not the particular
behavior they display or their chronological age. Hence, just as schools
conduct educational assessments of your children to understand the level
of their educational development, you need to conduct emotional
assessments of your children on a regular basis. I’m not suggesting some
kind of formal assessment, but a deepening of your understanding of
their actual level through observation, rather than assuming they are at
the level they are “supposed” to have attained. Some children are mature