Young children experience a range of emotions and express themselves in many different ways. It’s normal for toddlers and young children to have tantrums and break rules while their social and emotional skills are developing.

It’s important that you and other caregivers provide support while your child is developing and learning to manage their own emotions. Guiding your child and encouraging positive behaviours will help them learn appropriate ways to behave.

Signs and symptoms of challenging behaviour:

Different families will have different expectations about what is acceptable and what is considered difficult behaviour. Some behaviours that families commonly find challenging include:

• defiance (e.g. refusing to follow your requests)
• fussiness (e.g. refusal to eat certain foods or wear certain clothes)
• hurting other people (e.g. biting, kicking)
• excessive anger when the child doesn’t get their own way tantrums.

What causes challenging behaviour in a child?

Challenging behaviour is sometimes due to your child not having the social and emotional skills they need to behave the way you would like them to. Often when a child misbehaves, it is a response to feeling anxious, angry or overwhelmed and they are struggling with processing these feelings.

Children need attention from their parents and carers to feel secure and thrive emotionally. Children may show challenging behaviours in an attempt to gain attention and responses from adults – for some children, even negative attention is preferable to no attention at all.

Young children are also easily distracted and have short memories, which may be why sometimes they don’t do what you ask them to.

There are a number of other things that might affect your child’s ability to control their reactions, emotions or behaviours, including:

• being unwell
• not enough sleep or being tired
• too much screen time
• poor diet or feeling hungry
• a change in family circumstances or routine.

Sometimes, ongoing challenging behaviour can indicate other health issues or an underlying developmental, social or emotional problem. It is also important to consider a child’s current situation or environment and how it may be affecting them. If you are concerned about your child, see your GP.

As part of healthy development, toddlers will slowly learn to control how they react to different situations. As your child gets older, they will be able to understand more about what behaviour you expect of them and be better able to control their behaviour.

We will continue with how to deal with this challenging behaviour in my next blog.

Stay tuned to know more….