Before parents can effectively intervene to stop a negative behavior it is important to understand what the child is believing and why. Without knowing what the child is thinking that makes their negative behavior rational and sensible to him it will be difficult, if not impossible to redirect or curtail it with optimum results. A good therapist can, by using paradoxical and other techniques, stop most undesirable behaviors. The problem is that stopping the behavior without dealing with the underlying motivation for the behavior has the potential to simply drive the thoughts and feelings to surface in other, often less benign ways.

Therapists, parents and teachers must be very careful about eliminating a behavior that the child finds useful without dealing with the underlying causes of the behavior. The child is much more apt to achieve some level of emotional and behavioral stability if the cause of the behavior is determined and addressed and the behavior gradually lessens of its own accord as it becomes less and less useful to the child.

The keys to unlocking a child's thought processes and thus helping the child change those behaviors which do not contribute to personal or societal happiness are found in the principles of personality development. Personality development has three major components: Genetics, In uterine experience, and First two years of life. These three factors have the most influence in determining how the child is going to think about life, his place in it, whether or not others can be trusted, whether or not the world is a caring place, etc. What happens in these three arenas, in short, contributes heavily to how a child thinks, and how a child thinks is going to determine how the child behaves.

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