Child stops momentarily and says, "No I won't. Let me alone." Child resumes and Mom resumes, "I said stop it." Child hesitates long enough for Mom to be distracted and begins again.

Where does such useless behavior come from? At first it can be just the random squirming and wiggling of a child that produces the reaction, "Stop that fidgeting!" Later on, when the child has learned how to get a reaction, the fidgeting develops specifics: hair-twirling, scratching, or ballpoint pen-clicking (for us older ones).

Another side to fidgeting has been shown in several psychology experiments repeated many times with both people and animals. In one example, a laboratory white rat is trained to press a lever for food. He soon learns that the food is only given for lever presses after long intervals of about two minutes. In the meantime there is little to do but wait. What to do, what to do? A water bottle is available, but he is not thirsty. But, faced with nothing to do, he drinks (remind you of anyone you know?).

But he does not just sip. He may drink up to two times his body weight while waiting for time to pass. You can see that this experiment requires regular clean-ups.

All that was needed to stop the extra drinking was to shorten the waiting time - down from 2 minutes to 30 seconds and the excess water-drinking was gone. Pay-offs came more often, there was work to be done, and our rat had no time for fooling around.

So fidgeting has two possible explanations. One, it could be used to pass the time as our furry waterholic does or, two, it could gain attention as a child uses hair-twirling as a conversation stopper.

Paying attention to other, more desirable behaviors will be a good strategy in either case. "Jumping on" fidgeting behavior will always be a dangerous habit for parents because bad behavior thrives on attention. If the fidgeting is not important, let's not make it so.

Another solution for fidget habits is to reward the lack of fidgeting. For example, one mother told me she promised her son two dollars if he could refrain from nail-biting long enough so that his nails would need cutting. Because this demand seemed a bit too large for a first step, she also promised a dime for each one of his fingernails that needed trimming because it had been allowed to grow.

Such a direct motivator must be used carefully. There is always a tendency to add reminders with a little nagging as well as just carry out the rule. In the child's view, he believes he needs more attention, and also in his view, any kind of attention will do - even nagging.

If we now come along with a new strategy to ignore fidgeting so that the child's usual attention-getting solution will no longer work, then we need to make an extra effort to find acceptable behavior that will deserve attention.