Reverse psychology. It certainly merits a try. Lord knows this family can do with a few changes.

Let me give you a much simpler solution. Few methods will get a child to do what they do't want to do below the age of reason and below the age where they can understand cause and effect. If you want the kid to eat something make sure the consequences of not doing it are iron clad and set in advance. The kid does X or you/they do not do Y. No yealling screaming pleading or stickers (which may backfire and the would not have motivated me at all when I was a child). Kid wants to play video games for an limited amout of time, fine the kid takes a shower, makes their bed, picks up the toys, eats two bites of vegetable, etc. and then and only then, does the kid get to visit a friend, eat desert, have a snack, go to library, play video games that day, read a book OR WHATEVER THE KID LIKES TO DO. Kid doesn't do the things that you want them to learn how to do, you quietly and firmly withhold what they enjoy. Simple. Isabel.

Isabel, the article is written for situations where the methods you describe fail. Sometimes the kind of behavior mod approach you talk about does work. Sometimes the child is so oppositional that it does not, and the problem escalates. What they are saying is that it can help to ease off for awhile, in this specific kind of case, and I agree with them.

Cat51, I totally disagree, Problems with children only escalate when the child finds out that occasionally his oppositional behavior is rewarded. This happens when the parents get frustrated and tell the child what the consequences will be and then fail to follow through on those consequences often enough that the child realizes that the threats are empty. It mostly happens where parents don't understand that occasionally rewarding bad behaviors will cause behaviors to persist much longer than when they are never rewarded or always rewarded. It can also happens when a parent thinks that they are imposing a punsihment when they actually are not. I will give you an example. I lived in a very small town when I was a child. We went to a much larger city that was very far away to do most of our shopping for special occasions. This only took place about three times a year. When I was a child I tended to be very car sick so I was at best neutral about these trips. Yes I enjoyed some of the shopping and the possibility of getting to eat something exotic (like Pizza) but at the same time was put off by the fact that I was either sick on the trip or totally asleep from the amount of dramamine that my parents had to give me to keep me from spending time in the car throwing up. I also was totally bored by following my mother around to endless department stores while she looked at things that I had no interest in. One time when I was about 10 or 11, my mother wanted me to do some kind of household chore that I did not want to do. She said that if I did not complete it by the next day that we would not go to the big city that weekend on a planned trip to do the shopping. I looked at her and said "OK fine". The mistake she made was that my mother assumed that because she enjoyed the trips to the city so much that I did too and that the threat of cancelling the trip would be enough to motivate me. It wasn't a motivator because for me the trip on the whole was always a negative experience. I had a number of friends when I was a child whose parents were very poor disciplinarians. Those parents all made the same mistakes Inconsistancy. First the parents never picked their battles and second, "No" never meant "no" It was just a starting point for negotiations and their children won most of the battles. Isabel

Problems with children only escalate when the child finds out that occasionally his oppositional behavior is rewarded.

I understand what you're trying to say here, but you're flat out wrong. Maybe you were like this as a child, and maybe your kids were like this, but many kids, for whatever reason, do not respond well to threats. Some kids just get angry at these methods and it turns into a power struggle, with the kids doing absolutely everything they can to punish the parents in turn. This cycle perpetuates itself until the situation has escalated beyond anything the parents had intended. It may not be your personal experience, but I've seen it happen.