Changing behaviour

Cayen had a scratching problem . He used to scratch when he was upset about something and also when he was feeling just fine. 

Outcome : all caregivers , from parents to grandparents and godparents, were all scratched every other day. It really hurt as he would dig in his nails (no matter how short) and scratch and usually we would see blood. 

I googled everything I could about "aggressive 1 year old" , "violent baby" etc and tried different ways from slapping the offending hand to nagging to scolding and warning , nothing worked. In fact, sometimes when we slapped the back of his hand, he would slap us back. 

Finally , I figured that perhaps he just needed a diversion or an alternative wat for him to express himself, so I decided to teach him a new trick - patting . So everything he scratch, I would put my hands on my hips and say "I'm angry" and growl a little. When he patted me, I would say "happy!" and then smiled very widely. I did that for three days and then he started to respond to me by patting but he continued to scratch the rest. Well, they continued their usual ways - grandpa laughed, grandma dodged, papa slapped, Godma exclaimed.  

When everyone finally decided to copy my method and reinforced the "Happy!" 
method, he dramatically reduced his scratch-for-no-apparent-reason behaviour and now go around patting everyone.

Learning : 
- sometimes babies don't respond to textbook methods. We have to morph our interpretations and applications to change their behaviour. 
- positive reinforcement works 

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