Question
Our 4 year old son is an attention addict in public. He will do whatever it takes to get good or bad attention. He interrupts adult conversations, says and does over the top silly nonsensical things to get a reaction, is mean to another child (usually his brother) if that child is getting more adult attention than he is, and so on. He is the pupil in Sunday school who tries to dominate the teacher's attention by asking lots of questions or giving all the answers. One Sunday he ran up in front of children's church and sang Yankee Doodle at the top of his voice while the other kids laughed, much to his satisfaction. At home, we give him specific periods of undivided attention throughout the day and also have specific times when he is expected to play alone. The rest of the time we're all casually interacting as a family off and on. At home with just our family he's pretty ok; its when there's other adults around that he goes into attention seeking mode. We've had him on the ticket system since the beginning of the year for other things and it's worked fairly well but it seems to be losing its effectiveness. Being sent to his room for the rest of the day and going to bed early is not as powerful as it used to be, either. We think we need to come up with something else. It doesn't help that most of the time, other adults reward his behavior with lots of attention. What should we do?
