If you're new here you might want to check out our top recommendation for parents. You can get a copy of The Total Transformation Program for free for a limited time, and it truly is a fantastic resource.

As parents, we all deal with the question of how to handle our children every day. When dealing with an oppositional child, this question becomes much more complex. It can seem like no matter what you say or do, your child simply refuses to behave appropriately, and you might feel like it’s purely to be contrary.

From the child’s perspective, however, this is a classic power struggle of two people who want different things. When you want something from your child, and your child wants something else, it appears to be a very simple dynamic of “this or that” – and the child naturally prefers one side of the question.

In many cases, the oppositional child is behaving this way not because of some inherent flaw, but because of learned behaviors which are no longer effective – the behaviors that worked when they were younger, for example, do not work quite as well now that they are older.

As children grow, oppositional behavior can become more pronounced simply because the child’s wants and needs are becoming more sophisticated. With time, they gradually contruct a mental framework that allows them to deal with the world around them. This framework initially deals with only one or two people – their parents – and gradually expands to deal with siblings, friends, and teachers.

But what worked with a smaller group of people may not always work with the world at large, and small errors can add up over time to create a way of viewing the world which is not accurate.

According to James Lehman MSW, the single most common problem children have is in identifying and interpreting the emotions of other people. Like most things, this is a skill that improves with practice, and many children don’t get much real practice.

Whether it’s because they only encounter a few people, or they only encounter a few emotional states, they have trouble seeing how other people are feeling… and interpreting what their words mean, over and above the verbal content, can be very difficult.

Many studies have shown that most of what we communicate – some studies say up to 93% – is not verbal. While we concentrate heavily on teaching our young children to speak, read, and write words, we don’t often spend much time teaching them how to understand the other elements of communication: tone of voice, pauses in speech, inflections, and body language.

When we exert a little effort in teaching these additional elements of communication, the oppositional child often finds the world a more understandable place, where there are other ways to achieve their goals.

To learn more about the oppositional child and you, I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

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