Parenting and Kids

Kids are impatient. When they want something, they want it now! And interrupting is one of the ways they try to get it.

Parents get annoyed. They try to correct the behavior, but often aren’t successful so bad habits can begin to develop.

How do you handle interruptions?

Do you scold? “Stop interrupting me! Can’t you see I’m talking here?”

Do you take a gentle approach? “Please don’t interrupt me. I’ll be finished in a minute.”

Do you make excuses? “Oh, she doesn’t mean to be rude. She’s having a bad day.”

Do you lecture? “How many times have we talked about interrupting me in the middle of a conversation? It’s not polite to keep pestering me like this. I’ll be done in a minute and you just need to wait young man.”

Do you explain? “Now we’ve talked about interrupting me when I’m busy talking to someone else. It’s not polite to keep saying “Mommy, Mommy” over and over again. I’d be happy to attend to you after I’ve finished talking to the doctor. And then it will be your turn. OK?”

Do you threaten? “If you don’t stop interrupting me I’ll have to take you home and you’ll no longer be able to stay at the playground.”

Do you bribe? “If you just let me finish my conversation I will let you watch Barney as soon as we get home.”

Perhaps you use combination of some or all of these strategies?

Parents don’t understand why their kids keep repeating these behaviors over and over again. It’s because these methods don’t work. That’s when they’ll come to me. They need help.

The key to correcting a bad habit is to train a child through easy learning steps. Training needs to done at the child’s pace which depends on how fast he learns. There are no rules for what speed that is. Then you need to factor in his personality type, learning style, distractions, emotional readiness as well as the patience level of the parent.

Ground rules for training

It is not OK for a child to be rude and interrupt a conversation. That goes for kid and adult conversations alike.
It is OK for a child to interrupt a conversation if they’re polite.
Parents can teach their child the etiquette of interruption, without crushing their excitement or their spirit.
Good manners and self-restraint can be taught at a young age (yes, even during the terrible-twos) if parents teach in small steps.
Each step must be mastered before parents move on to the next step.
Rushing the learning process will not work. Depending on the child, it can take several weeks or months to master the art of polite interrupting.

Five steps for teaching a child how to interrupt politely.

Teach good manners. Be clear your child knows what ‘polite’ or ‘rude’ behavior means. Give specific examples of good and rude language and then teach that the correct way to interrupt a conversation is by saying “Excuse me.”
Acknowledge your child. Each time the magic words ‘excuse me” are used and be sure to let your child know how pleased you are. Say something like, “I’m glad your remembered your good manners. What’s up?”
Take immediate action. In order to reinforce the good manners lesson, you need to stop your conversation immediately. In other words once she’s said those magic words you turn and attend to her. Your quick response is important because she needs to know she’s making progress.
Teach waiting. Once your child consistently (for several days) remembers to use the correct words for polite interruptions, move to the next step and that is teaching her how to wait while you finish your conversation. It’s not always convenient to stop what you’re doing to attend to your child. Say, “Thank you for being polite and I’ll be with you in a minute.” Have her wait only a few seconds (5-10) and then acknowledge her waiting. Say something like, “Thank you for waiting for me to finish. What is it?”
Stretch waiting. After several successful days or weeks of training your child to wait a few seconds, you will want to teach her to wait for longer periods of time. Incrementally and slowly, add more time to each waiting period. Building up her skills to about two to three minutes. Again, the key here is to teach her over a longer stretch of time. So, in week one, you may want her to wait ½ a minute. In week two, it may be 1 full minute, and then in week three a full 2-3 minutes. However, don’t make the child wait for more than 5 minutes if she is under the age of five. They’re not quite ready to stretch beyond that.

Learning takes time

One of biggest reasons that parents fail using this method is that they want their child to ‘just do it.’ They forget to observe and watch their child for signs of readiness before moving on to the next step.

So be patient, be patient, be patient and it will come. Once you can see your child has mastered a new step, move on.