Archive for August, 2009

Disciplining Your Pet Bird

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Pet birds with behavioural problems usually have social problems too. There would be times when behaviour issues with birds can be brought about by lack of interaction with owners, conflict with other animals or just because of sickness.  It is important to identify the reasons why birds are showing negative behaviour.  By identifying the stressors you can take it out of the birds’ system.

Positive reinforcement is an effective method which can be used to train and tame birds. Positive reinforcement focuses on what birds want like food, a scratch, verbal praise, comfort and other similar things.  Negative reinforcement, of course, is the opposite of this and is rarely successful in the long run.

Punishment never resolves the birds’ behaviour issues.  To address negative attitude of birds, here are some simple tips you can keep in mind:  

• Show your dissatisfaction with your bird’s behaviour by ****** expressions.  Frown.  Birds can pick up ****** expressions and body movements.  The best method of showing dissatisfaction towards your pet bird is by your body movements.  Maintain eye contact when doing this.

• There are bed owners who also suggest turning your back behind your birds or ignoring them.  This would discourage them into doing bad acts.

• Some bird owners say that it is effective to speak to birds with low but not loud voice.  Tell them what they did was wrong.  But be concise and short as possible. Too much negative attention can have negative effects on your pet.

• Never hit a bird.  Birds have fragile bones, physical force may injure them fatally. Also, bird abuse can also result to aggressiveness and viciousness.

• When disciplining your pet, never compromise their health.  Examples would be insufficient food and water supply, neglecting the cage and even bathing them.  This can result into deep emotional and physical injuries.

• When giving birds food as rewards for their good behaviour, choose some food which they would enjoy but rarely eat.  It is also good to pet, scratch them as positive reinforcements.  But be cautious of offering treats with too much sugar and fat.  

There would be instances when severe aggression and viciousness is treated with mood-modifying drugs.  When having problems with your birds you can consult your avian behaviourist or your vet.  But any treatment is useless without addressing the issues causing the bad behaviour.  

Actually, it is important to determine if the bad behaviour is brought about by medical condition.  So if you have noticed anything with your bird it would be best to bring them first to a vet to make sure that medical issues are ruled out.

Attitude cannot change overnight. So do not be disappointed if your birds are not showing improvements immediately after employing the mentioned tips.  Just like when disciplining children, consistency is the key when training your birds.  Birds would understand what you would like to happen when you start being consistent with your method and ways.  

When disciplining your pet birds, it is important to balance things.  Of course you wanted to correct bad behaviour, but it is as important to reinforce of point out the good behaviour also.  Birds respond to training better when focusing on the good things, not the bad things.

This method may require hard work, patience and love.  It may take a long time, but when you look at your happy pet bird, I think its going to be worth it.

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Crucial Factors For Building Trust With and in Your Children!

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

We all want to trust the people who are caring and providing for us. Your children’s views on trust begin the moment they leave the safety of the womb and enter the vast, cold world around them.

You immediately begin caring for your newborn (as you continue to do for your other children), and thus your children learn to trust that mom and dad are there to meet their needs. Without that trust in others, children cannot grow into mature, self-confident and independent adults.

When working to foster such trust in your children, here are some points to keep in mind:

The importance of touch: scientific studies have shown that children who are not touched in a positive manner (hugs, kisses, holding hands, etc.) tend to develop attachment disorders. They cannot connect to others, or place their trust in caregivers. Thus, it’s important to provide your children the comfort, security and trust of physical touch.

Positive reinforcement with words: verbally reaffirming for your children that you love them unconditionally helps to create a stable, safe environment where the children know they are loved and cared for. If children know they will still be loved, even when they make a mistake or misbehave (even if there are consequences, such as an unpleasant punishment), the lines of communication remain open. Your children know they can still come and talk to you without feeling they should hide whatever they’ve done wrong.

Establish routines and consistency: routines (meals, baths, bedtime, etc.) provide your household and your children with a sense of control. Being consistent and repeating those routines takes away some decision-making from your child, yet lets them feel a sense of control over their world through established expectations. It also establishes limits (bedtime, curfew and so on) and teaches children to make good decisions and abide by limits, otherwise there will be consequences, whether it’s in your household or in life.

Of course, you, too, must be consistent. You must keep your word and be true to the rules of your household. Doing so will help establish and build trust in your children, and that in turn will help them move from the safe haven of trust and respect you’ve established in your family and apply those lessons to life.

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Parenting Children for Success

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

Parents often deal with their kids the way they were disciplined. This may involve archaic notions about parenting that no longer work in today’s world with children. It is not unusual for adults to believe that parenting primarily involves the use of power and control. In William Glasser’s book, The Identity Society, he makes the point that the nature of parenting has changed over the last several decades.

Authority figures are no longer respected by virtue of the role they play. Teenagers are no longer compliant merely because their parents bark out orders. Glasser is very pragmatic about this issue. It’s not a matter of what’s right or wrong with reference to the values of parenting, it’s what works. Typically, using control tactics no longer work with kids. Many teachers have a problem grasping this concept. They believe that they can coerce kids into doing schoolwork. It usually doesn’t impact the child. Parents try to act authoritarian around their children and it backfires. Discipline is about role modeling respect, being firm, setting appropriate limits, and establishing consequences.

The most important step to discipline is creating a positive relationship with a child. Next, one must educate and coach kids on what you want them to accomplish. Developing autonomy within your children involves coaching and educating them to take responsibility for themselves. Respect must be modeled. That’s the way things are within our current cultural setting. You can complain about, say it’s not fair, but it’s the reality. Life is a lot more fun when children like and respect their parents. Most children will do most anything for parents they respect. I realize that there are exceptions, and in those cases parents need not feel guilty for bad parenting. Some kids make poor choices regardless of how connected we are to them.

For parents, “stepping out of the bubble” may mean viewing the parenting process from a different perspective. It may mean giving up the image of parenting that was established during their childhood. Sometimes, parents will internalize the image of parenting that was handed down to them even if that perception was intolerable. Sometimes caretaking for our kids involves doing the opposite of what was done to us. We need to get in touch with the child within us. We need to remember what it was like to play and have fun. If our childhood wasn’t fun, then we need to do some grief work and vow to make things different with our own children. If our inner-parent is critical, we will most likely have unrealistic expectation for our children. We need to listen to the inner-critic and let it speak. We may hear tones of the tyranny of the “shoulds.” The inner-critic or inner- parent is full of moral injunctions. It is the judge and jury of our behavior. Combine that subpersonality with the pusher-driver part of us and you have a toxic combination. The pusher-driver is the inner part of us that says, “What I am doing is not good enough. I must always try harder.” Parents need to get in touch with the inner-critic and the pusher-driver and identify with their contents and then detach. Parents will want to rationally respond to these subpersonalities with more reasonable ways of viewing specific issues. This process of rational responding will assist in clearing up the “muddy water” when it come to coaching and advising our own children.

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Using Time Outs For Discipline

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Parents do their best to teach their children basic respect, how to treat others, and right from wrong. There are just about as many different discipline methods as there are parents and no one method is right for every child. Many parents use time out discipline when their children misbehave and have success teaching their children in this way. Time out discipline can be effective if you keep the following guidelines in mind.

Time outs are appropriate when children do not follow rules, hit, push, or exhibit other unacceptable or dangerous behaviors. A time out gives a child a chance to think about what happened and how to act acceptably next time, if parents give them a clear message about what they did wrong and what the appropriate action should have been.

Time outs are most effective if they are used consistently and without multiple warnings. If parents tell their child over and over to stop doing something or stop breaking a rule, children will learn that they can go so far before they are punished. Giving children clear guidelines and enforcing time outs the first time they misbehave will save parents a lot of grief.

Because a time out is designed to give a child the chance to calm down and think about what happened the location of the time out is important. It should be away from the group, activity, or other objects or people that will distract them. A child’s bedroom is not usually a good place for time out because there are many things to distract them and the area is too large for them to have to sit still and think about the situation. Small areas such as a chair, corner, or hallway where children are removed but can remain supervised are usually better places.

It is important to tell children why they are being placed in time out so that they can understand what behaviors are wrong. It is equally important to tell children how they should have acted and give them clear suggestions on how to better handle the situation in the future. This will give them something to think about while in time out so that the time out acts as a learning experience.

Just like any discipline method, time outs do not work for every child but they can be valuable discipline tools for many children if they are used correctly. While a time out is a form of punishment the ultimate goal of any form of discipline should be to teach your child appropriate behavior so they can make good choices in the future.

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Beliefs about children

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

In lay circles, I commonly hear children being described as attention seeking, manipulative or doing things deliberately to ‘get at’ their parents. Parents are advised that they can’t ‘give in’ to children and must ‘come down hard’ on their behaviour because otherwise it will keep happening. In the education sector, this view is translated into the exhortation that a child has ‘got to learn’.

Cognitive behavioural theory

The assumption behind this demand is that children will not mature, grow or develop naturally but must be forced to do so right now. Similarly sour views of children are often promulgated by even those commentators with credentials that might suggest a more informed opinion, such as the following (which I have embellished with italics):

• ‘Kids, when they are little, are in a way sort of nuts! They are not born reasonable and unselfish, they are born unreasonable and selfish’.

• ‘When students are not given the limits they need, they will act up in order to make the adults around them take notice’.

• ‘Children are not born good; they have to be disciplined, otherwise they are a threat to the rest of society’.

• ‘If students are given the freedom to do nothing, that is most likely what they will do’.

• ‘Today’s youth is rotten to the core, it is evil, godless, and lazy . . . It will never be able to preserve our culture’. *

Sir Rhodes Boyson was an ex-school principal and British Conservative MP advising the government on educational policy, culminating in The Conservative Education Reform Act of 1988. It would be comforting if these negative views of young people were all, like the last one, written on clay tablets over 3000 years ago but, as you can see, the previous quotes are far closer in time to this millennium. They clearly imply the belief that children will not choose to put in effort to learn or engage in prosocial behaviour unless forced to do so (Kohn 1996a). To that end, punishment is typically used either to incite people to improve their behaviour in future, or to achieve retribution for a past wrongdoing. While the first, utilitarian, purpose might seem the more likely in schools, Weiner reports that punishment is instead commonly applied as retribution, particularly when students’ failure is perceived by their teachers to be volitional. Even when punishment is used for utilitarian purposes, Kohn (1996a) questions the underlying assumption that children are so intent on behaving badly that they will not desist unless inflicted with pain.

Thinking of children in these harsh terms inexorably leads to authoritarian attempts to control their behaviour. Paradoxically, seeing children as fragile also leads to the same conclusion, justified by the claim that they ‘need’ limits to feel secure (see, e.g., Trusty & Lampe 1997). Not only is this ageist (such generalisations would be questioned if applied to adults on the basis of their sex, race or culture), but there is no evidence for the claim. It confuses limits with structure . Thus, in the absence of evidence about its truth, humanists reject what Miller (1987) terms this ‘poisonous pedagogy’ and assume instead that children are equally capable of altruism as they are of being thoughtless. This assumption, although also unprovable, seems logical in the face of statistics that there are more murders of people aged under one year than there are of people aged over one. It would be self-destructive if babies were programmed to threaten the goodwill of the caregivers on whom their survival relies, so it is assumed that they are instead programmed to try to work in with adults.

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