Non Compliance

Having our child not following what we say or do what we tell them is indeed one of the biggest challenges us parents face in raising our children. Usually we would tend to just blame the child for being stubborn, lazy, annoying and basically non-compliant.

However with Raiyan, especially in the early years, the issue of non-compliance never cropped up simply because we never expected him to comply seeing how he wasn’t able to understand what we instructed him to do anyway. And even when he DID seem to understand what it is we wanted, the tantrums that erupted thereafter were just too scary that we would just give in and let him do whatever he wants!

But upon starting ABA with me also learning to how best to communicate our needs and not just for Raiyan to communicate his needs, I discovered that maybe its not necessarily a case of “non-compliance” but more because children generally either do not understand the instruction OR the instruction is just too BIG to follow.

For example, we always like to tell the kids to put away their toys and we get upset when they don’t do it. Then we complain about how lazy they are and we threaten them with punishment if we don’t see them clean up their toys within the next five minutes etc. But what I’ve discovered I can do instead is to tell Raiyan to just put one or two toys in the basket and see if he’s willing to do that. He usually does because it’s a simple, small and straightforward thing to do and after he has done that I load up on the praises and the verbal reinforcements (good job Raiyan! You’re SUCH a good boy for putting your toys away!!) and after that I try to push it further and ask if he wants to put away more toys by asking or rather challenging him by saying “do you think you can put away three more toys in the basket?” and after having so positively reinforced the first time, he would still be motivated to do a bit more simply because he’s already on a roll with it and also since the next task just seems so achievable anyway.

Therefore, whenever you think your child is not “complying” with what you’re telling him or her to do, try giving them the benefit of the doubt that either they don’t actually understand the instruction or if the instruction is just too big and alien-like for them. Break the task down to something they are confident they can achieve and with every little achievement we compliment them and make them feel good about themselves and pretty soon after a series of little broken down tasks, the whole instruction would have been complied with before you know it!