The first step in managing your children's behavior is to understand why they misbehave.

Your children's (and everyone else's) behavior is the way they try to get their needs met. Too often we focus on stopping the behavior instead of finding an acceptable way to meet the need.

Imagine the following situation:

• You are a single mother with three children; nine year old Elisha, six year old Aaron, and two year old Jason.
• You have been looking for work for over a year. Your unemployment benefits have run out. You have no food or money, and your family and friends have none to loan you.
• You have applied for food stamps. Your social worker said they should arrive in five to seven days. You have sold all your belongings and tried all the community social service agencies with no luck.
• Your children have not eaten since yesterday morning. They have been crying and complaining about hunger pains. You are hungry, tired, and worried yourself.
• You have to get food for your children. What are your options?

Here are typical options foster parents bring up in Fosterparentscope class.

1. Ask the grocery store manager for food in exchange for work
2. Stand at intersection and ask for help
3. Go door to door asking for food
4. Steal food from a grocery store
5. Stand outside a restaurant and ask people to buy something for your children
6. Prostitute yourself

Some of these are unacceptable (and even illegal) in society's eyes. Imagine the response of authorities, friends, family and neighbors if they saw you stealing, begging or selling your body. What would you think if you saw a neighbor doing those things?

You can see from this example that because the unacceptable behavior causes such strong reactions, people focus on the behavior instead of the need behind it.

When children display unacceptable behavior in families, parents often focus their energy on changing the behavior (swearing, stealing, destroying property) because it is so upsetting. Angry at the behavior, parents often turn to punishment to stop it. However, if parents can discover the need behind the misbehavior and think of an acceptable way to meet that need for it, they (and their children) will be more successful in the long run. Open questions and reflective listening are good techniques to discover the need behind misbehavior.

Sometimes punishment is not only ineffective, it actually encourages misbehavior. If your foster children have been starved for attention, they may have learned that misbehaving gets attention. The attention (punishment) is negative, but at least it fills the need. If you show your children more positive ways to get attention, you can fill the need and stop the misbehavior at the same time.

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