Healthy @ Home Tip from Secretary Friedlander: Positive Discipline During COVID-19

Adults are not the only ones feeling stressed under the current circumstances – children and adolescents are also feeling the stress from physical distancing, limited access to outside support, and uncertainty. This may lead to challenging behavior at home from children of all ages. It’s hard to know how best to respond when it seems like so many things have already been taken away from youth, and from all of us. Here are some ways to help children learn right from wrong under the current circumstances:

1. Praise the desired behavior, ignore what you don’t want to see. Children focus on the things we pay attention to, not on things we ignore. Reward what you want repeated.
2. Redirect children away from the undesirable activity to a more desirable one.
3. Try “time in” instead of time out – time in means instead of sending the child away from others, you focus on the child and spend time with them. Children may act up as a way to create connection to adults; time in is a way to address that need for connection.
4. Allow natural consequences to play out. Children often learn more from their own mistakes than from our consequences.
5. Make sure consequences are proportional to the infraction. Provide consequences to teach responsibility and the appropriate way of doing something; never punish for solely punitive reasons.
6. Make sure consequences are developmentally and culturally appropriate for the child.
7. Give youth the opportunity to reduce the duration or severity of the consequence by demonstrating they have learned a lesson and modified their behavior.
8. Keep consequences short; lessons get lost over time and you may end up punishing yourself more than your child.
9. Engage your child in determining the consequences – you may be surprised at how seriously they take this responsibility.
10. Regulate your own emotions. If you lose your cool, it is likely to escalate their emotional and behavioral dysregulation even more. Try to maintain a steady, firm and neutral disposition.

Remember, we will get through this together. That’s what makes us #TeamCHFS, #Team Kentucky!

Don’t forget that you have a wonderful resource available in the Kentucky Employee Assistance Program (KEAP). You can reach them at 502-564-5788 or 800-445-5327 and find more information at https://personnel.ky.gov/Pages/KEAP.aspx.