How To Stop Your Child From Throwing Things on The Floor

Hey everyone. Today we're gonna talk about how to stop your child from throwing stuff. This is Ming from agentsofspeech.com and if your child is throwing stuff right now, you need to watch this video. Alright? So how to stop your child from throwing stuff at home? Your child might be like throwing stuff left and right and driving you crazy. Tip number one is to prevent it from happening. And how do you do that? How do you prevent something from happening? Are there any tell tale signs? Are there any things that happen before your child throws something? So do their eyes go somewhere else? Do the hands start moving? I know that most children are very, very fast and that's because the distance between them and the thing is actually the thing that they throw is actually very close to prevent it from happening. You have to learn to observe your own child to see what's gonna happen. A lot of parents always say, hey, Ming, how come my child at your clinic, he never throws a fit or throws a tantrum? It's because I actively prevent it, right? I actively prevent it. And number two is my environment, my whole clinic room is actually designed so that children actually comply and obey. But the thing is, you're at home, so they have home court advantage. And you should learn how to observe your child to see what happens right before they actually throw something. The second tip I think is a little more practical because you know, you might not be able to see exactly when your child's gonna throw is to actually prevent it by always having a hold on the things that your child holds. Right? For instance, what kind of stuff does your child throw? Is it like a toy? Is it like the utensils, the food? Always have your hand on it. Okay, I know if you have other children at home, it's super hard for you to always keep your hand holding on something and so you need some help. It might be like dad, it might be mom, it might be the helper, it might be the older brother or elder sister. So someone has to keep them in check in the beginning. Last thing I want to talk about, about prevention is that you have to remember that whenever a behavior happens again and again, it gets reinforced. Meaning that if your child can throw it once, he'll throw it twice, throw it three times. You must prevent it. It's not right. And it's also not a human right for them to do these kind of things at home. The next thing you want to do now that you've prevented it is to find out why, why is he throwing stuff? Okay? Are there certain things that he throws the most. Is it toys? Is it balls? Is it like food? Is it utensils? What is he throwing? Let's say he's throwing food and stuff. It might be because they don't want to eat. If they're throwing toys, which is always the case for a lot of children who are delayed. The reason behind it might be that they don't know how to play the actual toy. So they have a lack of play skills. So you cannot blame them for throwing something that's not supposed to be thrown because they don't know how to do that kind of stuff. If that's the reason why your child is throwing stuff, then the first thing to do is to teach play skills. Teach them how to play toy and always have a hand on it. So to show them how to do stuff. And the other reason might be, hey, they actually like a reaction when you feel stuff. When you get high pitched and you go, whoa, no, stop it. That kind of stuff. Actually, your child might like it. They don't understand that it's negative attention. They might seek for that attention because it's more than you would actually give him on a daily basis. Then they might actually want to do it to just get attention from you. If that's the case, then you should stop, stop giving attention and keep a neutral tone to everything. I'm not saying this for you to be cold towards your child. It's like an experiment. You limit the amount of variables and then we can think about, okay, what's going on. So if I don't react this way, what happens? It might actually be that your child is trying to express certain things. So if they're trying to replace certain things, for instance, if they're throwing food and utensil on the floor that they don't want to eat anymore, you have to think about teaching replacement behaviors. And what I mean by that is basically just talking or like just a gesture. Let's say that the intention for a child to throw something is that they want something to stop. You can just teach them to push away the balls or give you a certain gesture like this. That's for finish all that kind of stuff. And if they throw to initiate play with you, hey, teach them to throw a ball or something. That's something more appropriate. Okay? So then they can actually have an outlet for that. Last thing is, hey, if it's really frustration release and you want to have a replacement behavior for that, you can teach them to actually channel their frustration towards something else. Okay, it might be like a doll that they can throw around or, you know, it might be a hug or something. So everyone has different ways of dealing with frustration. Even us adults, we do something else. But some. Some people have a cigarette, some people have a beer. They not saying that's the most healthy thing, but at least it's more socially acceptable. So you need to find something that is susceptible to your child. It might be like, just like kicking a ball around or something, or, you know, squeezing a squishy toy. That kind of stuff is okay, I think. I don't like using consequences, negative consequences to actually stop behavior. But sometimes that's just the thing we have to do. And if you are on a tight schedule or you're outside, well, you're not going outside anytime soon. Consequences do work. So when they throw something, you can remove something that your child likes. And I believe that's the best way to give a consequence. It's like, oh, you think this is your human right to have all these things? Well, guess what? When you do something that I don't like or, you know, it's not acceptable within our house, I'm going to take some stuff that you like the most away from you. And that's not forever. And that's not being mean or anything. It's just telling them in the way that they can understand. Because chances are, if you're watching this, your child has problems in speaking and communicating with you. Let me give you example. So if they throw something immediately, I will remove the toys that your child is playing right now or just end the playtime as a whole. Okay. Or even if he or she is eating, if he's really eating and not just like throwing something to tell you that doesn't want to eat anymore, then I think what you should do is to remove the food, right? Or, you know, remove yourself as a. As a reinforcement, you know, remove yourself and ignore your child. Another way to do it is actually to do timeouts, which is more helpful with older children. If you're dealing with a toddler around two to three years old, it probably wouldn't work that well. So I wouldn't use a timeout for younger children. But for older children, they do kind of understand because they get removed from the situation and there's a pattern change and they know that they did something out of the norm. And just to let you know, this doesn't really work that well. The best way to really stop throwing is to prevent it, number one. Number two, find out why and to actually praise and reinforce them with rewards and everything whenever they're not throwing. How do we do this is that we know what times they actually throw do throw things. If we observe enough. And then what we can do is to actually trigger them, to entice them to throw something. But before they actually throw it, they actually commit the crime. We give a good reinforcement, a reward to them. So remember that video I talked about, you know, praise and everything? And you know the ticket system in Richmond, Canada, where they give positive tickets instead of negative? That's what I'm talking about. Okay? So if you haven't, you can check out the video. I don't know where I put it on a card here on YouTube. So check that out. Okay. So behavior is always hard to do. Okay? And if there's any more questions that you have right now, I've probably talked about it in my FAQ over@agentsofspeech.com FAQ. You can go there and just watch those eight videos. So with that said, thank you so much. Same as before. If you liked it, please like the video. Please share it to other parents who need this information. And most importantly of all, please do comment underneath in this video to ask me more questions that are related to teaching your child at home right now. Okay, I'll see you in the next video pretty soon. Bye.