Ming (Agents of Speech) explains that many instances of children's bad behaviour (e.g., tantrums) are attempts to get parental attention. He recommends ignoring as an experimental strategy: remove attention to test whether the behaviour stops, continues, or escalates. If the child escalates, they may be learning to raise intensity to regain attention; if the tantrum stops, ignoring is effective.
Ignoring works wonders when your child's bad behavior is to get your attention. When they have a bad behavior, like they're throwing a tantrum and you give them attention, you're giving them what they want. So therefore, in their minds and their little brains, they will think, ah, it's working. I'm going to scream and shout more so that I get more love. If that's the reason why, then ignoring works a lot. But you wouldn't know if your child's tantrum is related to attention seeking. Why we ask you to ignore is to remove one of the variable to see if okay, if I ignore, what's going to happen? Does it continue or does it stop or does it increase? If it increase, is it still might be that they're seeing for your attention because they're escalating your behavior. They're going to escalate their tantrum and see if it works or not. What that means is that he learned a new thing. I need to get to a level 10 just to get my mom's or my dad's attention, which is bad. So keep on ignoring. If that's the case, the tantrum stops, then great. Ignoring is good.
