A Therapist Answers Parents' Questions about Problem Behavior

By GreatSchools Staff

John W. Maag, Ph.D. is a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, specializing in the education and treatment of children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders. He is a licensed psychotherapist and has published more than 80 articles and book chapters. Among four books he's authored, Parenting without Punishment won a Parent's Choice award.

This conversation between Dr. Maag and parents of children with learning difficulties about how to deal with kids' problem behavior related to homework, perfectionism, television viewing, and other topics, originally took place in 2006 on the parent message board hosted by Schwab Learning, a former program of the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation. We feel readers will find much that is useful and important for their own efforts to support their children.

Homework hassles

From: 2KIDS

My daughter is 10 and has dyslexia. All she wants to do is play with friends when she gets home. For us what works best is she comes home does HW and then goes out. I know she struggles every day she goes to school more so than the avg kid because of her LD and I do realize she needs to play for her well being. I find myself getting frustrated at times since all we do is study. How should we be balancing the home and school to be fair to all?

Dr. Maag responds:

It is very difficult to "balance" homework and leisure - we don't want either one to take up a child's entire day. I think your plan of saying homework comes before play is great. I also like the "breaking it up" into smaller more manageable chunks. In terms of your daughter rushing though, you can give a little extra incentive for taking her time. For example, you could tell her that after finishing her homework she can go out and play for an hour…

A child who won't keep up with his schedule

From: Beth64

My 14YO son who is deaf & has ADD with ODD tendencies continues to move on his own schedule. Each morning I wake him up and he takes forever to get ready for school, many times causing the bus to wait for him for 5 min. I have been tempted to allow him to "miss" the bus but it is very important that he go to school. What do I do to get him to respect the time schedule we must keep in order to not miss the bus? He also does the same sort of delaying tactics when we have appointments and other time schedules…

Dr. Maag responds:

Getting children ready for school can be a daunting task. Child experts provide two main solutions to that problem. First, place your child on the bus regardless of where he's at in the "getting ready" process. That means he may go to school in his pajamas. Of course, using this technique requires parents to inform the school and for them to give the "okay" to this type of plan. The other approach is one that I favor which is to use a "star chart" and kitchen timer to motivate your son to get ready in timely fashion…