Plus, it’s a lot more pleasant for them not having a human air-raid siren
howling in the background.
Then sometime when the phone is not ringing (is there such a time?),
we can pull our child onto our lap and hash it out:
DAD: “Taylor, honey, I notice that whenever I’m talking on the
phone, you want to talk to me at the same time. Do you have any
thoughts on that?”
TAYLOR: “I wanted to show you Cinderella and the wicked sisters.
See?”
DAD: “Yes, Taylor. Let me look at it for a minute.... That’s very
pretty coloring. But I can do only one thing at a time, dear. When
I’m talking on the phone, I can look at your Cinderella and the
wicked sisters only a little. But when I’m not on the phone, I can
look at them a lot.”
TAYLOR: “But I wanted you to look at them when you were on the
phone!”
DAD: “Well, I’m thinking that I can look at them a lot better when
I’m not talking on the telephone. I really would like to look at them
a lot, but I can’t then because I have to talk to the person on the
telephone. If you can show me your coloring when I can look a little
or when I can look a lot, which do you think would be better?”
TAYLOR: “When you can look at them a lot.”
DAD: “Right. And when would that be?”
TAYLOR: “When you’re not talking on the phone.”This technique is also effective with kids who interrupt discussions
between parents or between a parent and another adult. The message
given to the child is that the interruptions are a problem and we don’t like
it. When it happens, the child must go somewhere else and think about it.
One parent reported that her strong-willed child didn’t respond well to
this method, so she engineered a training situation. She had one of her
friends call and play along. When the child interrupted, Mom calmly