Children love the attention of their parents. A child will say “look at me, mommy, look” a hundred times as they go down the big slide at the playground even with you standing there with your eyes on them. Attention can be equivalent to care and love when it is given in healthy ways and healthy doses.

Many of us parents are acquainted with the fact that if children do not receive enough positive attention they may go to great lengths to gain any attention at all even if it is negative. At first a parent may not recognize the symptoms of this problem, but if you realize that your kids are acting up more than usual and you have been particularly busy lately, this can be a clue. Some parents are very adept at predicting their children’s responses. Once there was a mother who could almost set a timer for how long she could talk on the telephone before her toddler would start taking off his diaper or tugging the tail of the cat.

So what choices does a parent have if they must spend a certain amount of time a day on the telephone? There are other circumstances, too, that come up, like needing to take care of a younger, more time-demanding sibling or merely getting dinner cooked every day.

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