Kids and Bad Habits

The adult instinct is to treat a child's bad habit like an adult's — identify it, interrupt it, replace it — and that instinct makes most of it worse, because a child's habit is almost always doing something, and the interruption costs the function. The piece gives parents four filters first: developmental (will they outgrow it?), the self-soothing trap, the control habit, and the problem-solving misread.

Then it hands over the active tools — incentive and substitution — and the destructive line where the response changes from watching to acting. Use it as your own guide to the parent side of habit work.