Incentives for Brave Behavior

• Most fearful children will try to avoid things that they are scared of. It is very easy to sympathize with your child's fear. However, children need to learn how to cope with fear. You will have to encourage you child to face his/her fears. Sometimes this can be easy if your child does not want to go to school, or go to sleep alone as these situations present themselves everyday and you are probably willing to make them do what they need to. Sometimes, it may be more difficult to find situations for your child to face what they fear. This may be the case if your child is afraid of storms or animals. When you help your child face things or situations that scare them and then reward them for being able to do it, we call this: giving incentives for brave behavior. You can do this at home as long as you are not afraid of the same things as your child.
• Guidelines:
• Choose one specific behavior with which your child has a hard time
• Figure out pieces of that situation the child can handle a little braver
• Examples: go to school without crying, call someone from class, invite a friend over
• Don't pick a general behavior such as "being brave"
• Choose a specific reward that your child will like
• Examples: for younger children, you may want to give stickers or points to earn a treat (dessert, rent a movie, choose dinner). For older children, they may value extra time on the phone or the computer
• As soon as your child has faced a little bit of his/her fear say specifically what you noticed , praise him/her and give a point. At the end of the day, let him/her turn in the "point(s)" for their reward
• When you child is able to do the one specific behavior without being afraid, then you can choose to work on a harder version