Martha: We had some questions submitted to us. This was one question. “My daughter will act silly to get people to give up the seat that she wants. How can I teach her a better way?” Actually, this is something that came up in Webinar #3. We had a video with Lear and teaching him to ask for a seat. And he had to learn to accept “NO” as an answer. This ability to accept “No,” that somebody would not give up a seat, was taught in a structured setting. So I think if anything like this is an issue, one approach might be to set aside a time to teach that skill in a controlled setting in the home or the classroom, where the child asks somebody to give up a seat, and sometimes the other person gives up the seat and sometimes he doesn’t. And the child is tagged and reinforced for accepting that and then moving to another chair.

We had some other suggestions for that. Instead of having the child get upset, instruct her to find her own special seat. Remember, you can put a blue dot on a chair and say, “Find the chair with the blue dot.” Tag her for finding the blue dot, walking to the blue dot chair, and sitting in the blue dot chair. With lots of reinforcement, this would encourage her to take part in this alternative behavior.

Another skill along these lines would be to teach her to find an empty chair with no one sitting in it. You could teach this in a contrived setting where you have two chairs and one has a teddy bear on it and the other one is empty. She can point to the empty chair, walk to the empty chair, touch the empty chair, and sit in the empty chair. These are all tag points or actions that you can reinforce with high-value reinforcers. If you want to divert this behavior of making a fuss, do some special observation to find out what is reinforcing her, and select reinforcers that are powerful enough to encourage her to take part in this alternative activity.