The Folly of Ignoring Bad Behaviour

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Don’t give it attention, or it’ll only get worse. It’s advice repeated so often it barely gets questioned anymore, offered by well meaning books and well meaning professionals alike. I think it deserves questioning directly, because what it is actually asking a parent to do is withhold exactly the thing a struggling child needs most, and call the withholding a strategy.

Where This Actually Comes From

This particular piece of advice has a name in behavioural psychology, extinction, a term borrowed directly from B.F. Skinner’s laboratory work, where a behaviour that stops producing any response from the environment eventually fades out. It works reasonably well on a lever a rat presses for food. I think it works very differently on a child whose behaviour was never simply a lever being pressed for a reward, but a signal being sent to another human being who matters to them more than almost anything else in their world.

What Ignoring Actually Communicates

A child who is struggling, and shows it through whining, clinginess, or repeated interruption, is not performing for an audience. They are signalling, in the only way currently available to them, that something is missing. Withhold all response, deliberately, and the message received is rarely calm down, this isn’t necessary. It is closer to nobody is coming, even now.

I do not think this is a small distinction. A child who learns their signal genuinely goes unanswered does not simply stop signalling because the underlying need resolved. They stop signalling because signalling stopped working, and the difference between those two outcomes is enormous, even though both can look identical from the outside as "the behaviour improved."

Fighting the Smoke, Not the Fire

A child’s behaviour is not the problem. It is smoke, rising from a fire burning underneath it. Ignoring the smoke does not extinguish anything. It simply removes the alarm while the fire keeps burning, quietly, somewhere the parent has now agreed not to look.

The Colleague Everyone Learned to Talk Over

Think of a colleague who kept raising a genuine concern in meetings and was gradually met with silence, no pushback, no engagement, simply nothing, until they stopped raising it at all. Everyone breathed a little easier. The meetings ran smoother. Nobody ever asked whether the concern itself had been resolved, only whether the disruption had stopped. It had. The problem, whatever it actually was, almost certainly had not.

A Different Lens

Your child interrupts you for the fourth time in ten minutes while you’re on a call, tugging at your sleeve, asking the same question they already know the answer to.

The thought that runs through most parents’ minds in that moment is immediate. If I respond every time, they’ll learn interrupting works. I need to hold the boundary and not give this attention right now. What follows is a flat, deliberately unresponsive silence, held until the interrupting eventually stops.

Every child arrives already expecting prompt attention when something feels urgent to them, not because they are spoiled, but because that expectation is wired in from birth. A child interrupting repeatedly is rarely testing a boundary. They are checking, again and again, whether they still matter enough to be answered right now.

They weren’t testing you. They were checking whether you were actually still there, and every silence that answered them said, a little more firmly, that you weren’t.

And it is rarely only about today. The checking behind an interruption like that is very often not a response to this one call, or even this one day. It has often been building for weeks, sometimes months, occasionally years, inside an environment that has been quietly unsettling in ways no parent ever intended or noticed, created unwittingly by people doing the only thing they have ever known how to do. To understand what a signal is actually seeking, correction, relief, some adjustment to a discomfort that has simply become the ordinary texture of the day, it is often necessary to look considerably further back than the interruption itself.

The Trap This Sets for Well Meaning Parents

Ignoring feels disciplined, even principled, offered as the mature alternative to giving in. But I think the discipline is aimed at the wrong person entirely. It disciplines the parent into withholding, not the child into anything resembling genuine calm, and the quiet that follows is very often relief at the silence, not evidence that whatever was actually needed has been met.

What Tends to Help Instead

I am not arguing that every interruption deserves a full stop and complete attention. I am arguing against silence used deliberately as a lesson. A brief acknowledgement, even mid-task, costs almost nothing and tells a child their signal was received, which tends to settle far more than any amount of practiced non-response ever will.

A Different Way of Reading Behaviour

Ignoring bad behaviour is a technique built for a laboratory, borrowed for a species it was never designed for. Once you start asking what a child’s signal is actually checking for, I think it becomes very hard to reach for silence as a strategy quite so easily again.