If your child vomits, beware!
Hello Dear Parents,
You may be witnessing the behavior of children stabbing, crying, vomiting in order to get what they want around you, or you may experience this in your own child. Many of the parents complain that “my child vomits to get what they want” and they often ask us questions such as “How should we act when our child vomits, Should we do what they say so that he does not vomit?”
It is more common between the ages of 2-6 for children to exhibit vomiting behavior to get what they want. Vomiting is a conditioned behavior if there is no physiological problem that could cause the child to vomit. As the child grows up, he is conditioned to vomit due to the inconsistent approach of those around him. As a parent, if you unconsciously allow your child to do what they want when they vomit, or if you give up on the decisions you make, the child realizes that the behavior of vomiting solves the problems over time and uses it as a solution for every problem he has with you.
We often hear from parents who come to our center, saying, “When we say let’s change clothes, the child starts to vomit”, “When we are told that we will not buy that toy, he tries to make himself vomit”. This shows that “the child has learned to use vomiting as a weapon against the parents to get what they want”.
If you think that your child vomits just to get what they want when there is no physiological reason, you should definitely get expert support to prevent this behavior problem from getting worse. Otherwise, this behavior disorder may form the basis for the child to experience psychomatic disturbances in the future. In other words, psychological pressures begin to create physiological problems. For example, in the face of very stressful and anxious events in adulthood, it may cause problems such as experiencing discomfort such as unexplained stomachache and headache, or exhibiting various dangerous behaviors such as attempting suicide knowing that it will be saved.
In this case, it is necessary to discourage the child’s behavior of using vomiting as a weapon without wasting time. For this, parents need to show a consistent approach and meet the emotional and social needs of the child without wasting time. Since parents are not experts in this field, they cannot determine the emotional and social needs of the child and implement a development program on their own. For this reason, as every job has an expert, it should receive support from an expert on the subject, that is, an expert pedagogue.
Sometimes parents try to change this behavior on their own without professional support and they may affect the child’s psychology more negatively. In such a case, the specialist has to work not only with the vomiting behavior of the child, but also with the psychological problems caused by the wrong approach, and the child’s recovery process is prolonged.
In order to be successful in this regard, parents must start this process under the supervision of a pedagogue and receive regular counseling until the recovery process is completed.
Hope your child is not conditioned to vomit,
Specialist Pedagogue Sevil Yavuz
Lecturer, Child, Adolescent and Family Psychology Specialist,
Family and Couples Therapist, Play Therapist
