The move is earlier than you think

Everybody tries to intervene at the shout. Count to ten, breathe, walk out of the room. Sometimes that works and mostly it does not, because by the time you are at the shout you are already at the shout.

The moment that matters is hours earlier and it is not dramatic. It is the ordinary afternoon when nothing is going wrong, and what you do with the behaviour you actually want.

That sounds like a dodge. It is not. It is the thing the research on parenting programmes keeps landing on, and it is not what most parents expect to hear.