How-To Teach Good Behavior to Your Preschooler
Everything a New Parent Needs to Know
I spent 20 years in education and I have talked to thousands and thousands of parents. The most asked question I get is “How do I teach my child to behave?”
At a restaurant, at the store, at the mall, at family functions, in school — how your child behaves is a reflection on you and your parenting skills. It’s unfair, I know, because what your child does is really up to them — Not You!
You feel that. As a parent, you want your child to do something and they just WON’T! Frustrating, right?
So what’s the answer? How do you teach your child right from wrong? There must be a way.
Yes there is…
But before we get into how to do this, you might want to know my background a bit. Who am I? Why do I know how to help your child? How can I help you?
In the beginning, back in the 1990s, the Wild West of education as I like to call it — that’s because it was before No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It was before what is now known as “Highly Qualified” Teachers and a half-dozen other labels that mean absolutely nothing.
I became a Teacher because my parents were both educators, my father was a Professor at Fordham University and my mother was one of the best special education Teachers in New Jersey.
Where did that leave me? What was I going to do? And Teaching is a really hard occupation. You may not realize it but being a Teacher tests every bone in your body. And I was an average Teacher at best. I want to be honest about that because I think integrity in education is critical to long term success. I was not the best Teacher in the world. Seeing my mother teach and listening to my father lecture in class — it was clear that my calling was not as a Teacher.
My biggest frustration was behavior. I felt like so many parents feel everyday. I want the students to do X work, but only half of them are listening to my instructions, two students aren’t paying any attention, one student is running around the room, and another student has decided to fall asleep.
What in the world is going on here? How did this become my life?
But what I didn’t realize was that everyday that I went into class and was faced with this frustration, it helped me understand what Teaching really was when I finally became an administrator.
In most states, you must be a Teacher for a few years before you can become an administrator, and having done that work, I see why. You need to feel what a Teacher feels. You need to understand the pain points of the job. You need to think like a Teacher.
But what I really learned was how parents feel everyday. They love their kids. Parents only want what’s best for their child, but at the end of the day — sometimes your child drives you insane.
Thankfully, I was lucky and fortunate to have some of the best mentors in education, when I became a Principal and Superintendent. Through their tutelage and my uncommon personality, I developed this Break-Through Theories of Education.
I say they are Break-Through because the students that came to my school had failed in every school they attended before mine. Under federal law, my students were protected and guaranteed a free, public education, so my students were always public or charter school students.
But in many cases, they had been transferred from one class to another, from one school building to another, hoping to find a program that could help them — but none existed. Until they found me and my school.
When I met parents for the first time, they were usually really skeptical. They were exhausted. I was the fifth or tenth administrator who they met and they all said “We can help.” I could see the disbelief in their rolled eyes at me.
“Right? Who are you?” they would say. And that’s where the conversation would start. Just like I’m telling you, I would say to them. “I am not as important as who your child needs to become.”
And I got their attention.
The real reason that I succeed as an educator where so many else fail is because I don’t matter. What matters is what your child learns and how they can use that knowledge to follow their dreams. If your child does not believe in themself, we have a problem. If your child does not believe they have hope for the future, we have a problem. And if your child does not make themself the most important person in their own life — we have a bigger problem.
Understanding this is what changed me from being a mediocre Teacher into one of the most respected Administrators in my field.
Let’s break it down.
Belief in oneself. The key to success in America and in a Democracy is having confidence in yourself. Yes, self-confidence is one of the most important factors in being successful. In 2020, self-confidence, real self-confidence, not fake confidence we see on social media — you know the type, the “Look at Me” photos.
Without real confidence in yourself and your skills, your child will shy away from risk and challenges. And the less your child faces obstacles when they are young — the more likely they will never take a risk when they are an adult. And the less self-reliant they will become.
Having hope for the future. If we have self-confidence, but we don’t have hope, then your child will give-up far too easily. Just look at your own life, did everything work out the way you expected it to? The answer is probably no. And in many cases, you are still working and developing the future you want for you and your family. It’s a never ending road to the future, we have to answer questions and overcome challenges all the time. If your child has no hope, they won’t even try.
“You need to make yourself the most important person in your life.”
— D.Scott Schwartz
Yes, this is my own quotation. Yes, I have it in quotes because I have said this quote over and over again to kids for the last 20 years. That means I lost count how many times I’ve said it.
What does it really mean?
It means that when kids are met with peer pressure, they remind themselves — I am the most important person in my own life — therefore I do not need to do what my peers are asking me to do. I care about me, more than I care about them. And self-protection in the age of social media is critical for healthy child development.
We are being bombarded everyday with marketing and advertising. Kids are being sold every 7 seconds, something new and shiny. How can they develop their own character, their own sense of self — if everyone is telling them who they are.
That’s why kids need to put themselves first and reject the peer pressure to put themselves last.
Is that a good background so far? I hope you are saying yes. And if you said Yes, then let’s get into how you can help teach your child good behavior.
Most preschoolers are ages 3 and 4, but these strategies will also work for 2 year olds. The first key to understand is that your preschooler does not think like you do. Please, if you get only one thing from this article it is that how your child thinks is not similar to how you think.
Your preschooler is just figuring out the world. They are in discovery mode. And they are beginning to see “ME” in the world. That is actually why they say these things all the time, “Mine” and “My Toys”.
Your preschooler is learning boundaries about who they are and what other people are, but they feel they have zero control. Yes, your preschooler is in a constant state of anxiety and they are trying to self-soothe all the time. If your preschooler sucks their thumb, it’s a sign of self-soothing.
The second key to understand is that your preschooler cannot learn “too many” things at once. We have this unhealthy need to be the best and to accelerate learning. To be fair to your child, please don’t do this. They are preschoolers.
If you want to have an overall sense of what you should be teaching your preschooler. Letter recognition, number recognition, vocabulary building, (if you want to do this in a foreign language you can as well), color recognition, and shape recognition.
That’s it. Do not drill your child on counting, or adding, or reading, or writing. They are preschoolers. The more confidence they can feel in all of those areas, the more prepared for kindergarten they will be and the more they will succeed in school.
The last key is simple behaviors. I need to repeat. Simple behaviors.
Many of my parents used to pull their hair out over their child’s behaviors. “Why can’t they just do the right thing?” And the answer was they were not properly taught how to do the right thing.
If you are concerned about what your child will do? Then you need to listen to this. You can teach them. But you need to take this very slowly. Teaching children how to behave is a slow process. And sometimes parents set themselves up for failure because they give up before the process has even begun.
I used to write at-home behavior plans for parents, who were really struggling. So let me give you the 3 things that create an at-home plan.
Number One: Pick 2 or 3 Behaviors you want to focus on. (That’s it. 2 or 3.)
Number Two: I would advise parents to reinforce every hour. It’s easy if you set up alarms or reminders on your phone or watch to ring every hour.
Number Three: Develop a Rewards Plan for your child. With the data you have collected with reinforcement, I would try and get parents to provide stickers to their children and larger prizes when they reached 75% of positive behavior.
Why does all of this work? It works because it’s based on 50 years of psychologically researched based studies. It works because it’s been proven to work through research studies.
What you don’t need? You don’t need a psychologist to write a plan. You don’t need to pay $1000s of dollars to experts to counsel your child. You don’t need a Ph.D. to make this work for you.
All the data, research and information is available to the public for FREE. And any parent can do this.
I need to say this because I hate when I feel like I’m forced to pay someone to do something that I could do myself. And so you don’t need to pay people to do this. Parents used to pay me to help them create at-home rewards programs because they didn’t want to spend the hundreds of hours of reading and research and it was just simpler, faster and easier to have me do it for them.
It made them feel more comfortable knowing that a true expert in this field was developing an easy to follow plan for them — they could follow and it took a few days, rather than a few months of research and reading.
The problem with that model is that I can only help a handful or parents at one time. That’s why I launched my education firm, The Education Development Institute in 2013 and why my conversations with parents and school districts in 2020 has changed so dramatically. We are all limited by the Covid Pandemic. We are all going virtual.
So how can the Education Development Institute help in 2020? And that’s why we are going to launch the Parent Community in the Institutes’ virtual ecosystem.
But I need more feedback from Parents, what are your biggest questions related to school in 2020? What do you need at-home to help your kids? This is for all K-12 students. What do you need from the Education Development Institute?
