  Higher order derivative theories, generally suffer from instabilities, known
as Ostrogradsky instabilities. This issue can be resolved by removing any
existing degeneracy present in such theories. We consider a model involving at
most second order derivatives of scalar field non-minimally coupled to
curvature terms. Here we perform (3+1) decomposition of Lagrangian to separate
second order time derivative form the rest. This is useful to check the
degeneracy hidden in the Lagrangian will help us to find conditions under which
Ostrogradsky instability do not appear. In our case, we find no such non
trivial conditions which can stop the appearance of the Ostrogradsky ghost.
