No Means No: How to Teach Your Child That You Mean Business

Dealing with an unruly child is never something we were looking forward to as parents, but it’s frequently something we need to learn. When that occasion arises, it’s easy to fall into the trap of taking your child’s behavior personally.

When your child is acting out at the grocery store, or says something rude to you in front of your friends, the first thing we feel is some measure of shame or embarrassment. We feel like the people around us will have a bad opinion of our parenting if we don’t do something about the child’s behavior.

The reality is that an unruly child is not attacking or disrespecting you, so much as trying to exert power. The child is entirely concerned with personal desires and goals, and it honestly has nothing to do with you – let alone anyone who might be watching.

The unruly child, in general, doesn’t feel much power to do things. Children can be told what to do and when to do it by more or less everyone, it seems – their parents, their teachers, their older siblings, sometimes any adult at all. This leaves them feeling powerless, and they have a strong need to have control over themselves.

When your child acts out, it is almost certainly not to embarrass you or make you look bad, and when you say something along those lines – you tell your child both that you don’t understand or appreciate what the child is really trying to do, and that this is in fact a way for the child to seize power.

Once you understand that the child doesn’t mean the behavior personally, and instead simply wants to have control, you can respond without feeling that your authority is being challenged.

The child does not want to take your authority away, but to have some personal authority. Opening up other areas for the unruly child to make choices (and have control) can be effective in filling this need.

If you’re at a loss for how to respond to these things without taking them personally, or what choices and responsibilities you can give your child, there are several books and programs available which can make the process easy to understand.

The overall goal of any parenting challenge is not to get the child to do what you want right this minute, but to help the child be a more effective member of adult society – and sometimes that takes a little more time and effort. In the end, like everything with your child, you’ll find that it was all well worth it.

To learn more about how to handle an unruly child, I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

When you have a child with behavioral problems, it’s only a matter of time before someone recommends you look into special schools for troubled kids. There are times these can be the right choice, but more frequently, the parents have other options that simply haven’t been tried yet.

There are a large number of well-researched systems and programs designed to help parents deal with their difficult children without needing to spend thousands on therapy sessions, or even more on schools. For troubled kids, there are a lot of reasons to look into other options before leaning on a special facility.

First and foremost, the way most of these facilities work is to establish a structure that deals effectively with misbehavior. Once the child leaves that structure, its effects are gone… and the misbehavior is likely to return. A structured environment can easily enforce rules, but when that environment is removed, the rules are frequently not followed.

Another important reason to use a more personal method of dealing with your troubled child is that the child isn’t the only one in need of instruction. The dynamic between parent and child is almost never exclusively one person’s responsibility… and learning to build an effective dynamic with your child isn’t likely, when your child is rarely at home.

According to James Lehman, the single biggest problem most troubled children have is that they don’t understand how to socialize with other people. The first and most critical social interaction they have is with their parents, then their families, and then their neighbors and communities. When they aren’t sure how to respond, they make strange choices of how to behave, because nothing seems like a good choice.

It’s worth noting that the community of children in these schools is not a normal community, and if your child is having difficulty with social interactions, the other children are not going to be much help. As troubled children themselves, they are not going to respond the same way as “normal” children, and the social skills developed in these schools may not translate to the world at large.

While schools for troubled kids have their place, it is worth the time and effort to use a system that instructs the parents and family as well as the child – so you can help your child learn these skills in the outside world, rather than just in a small artificial environment.

It may not be as easy as signing your child into the care of a facility, but in the long run, it is frequently more effective… and always a lot less expensive.

To learn more about are schools for troubled kids what my child needs, I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.

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.

When your child exhibits oppositional behaviour, it’s not always for the simple reasons that immediately spring to mind: trying to avoid responsibility, simple contrariness, actively wanting to make your life miserable. The real causes are simple, and can easily be dealt with using a system such as James Lehman’s Total Transformation Program, once the root of the problem is understood.

When you try to deal with the oppositional behaviour on its own, you’re treating the symptom and not the problem. Oppositional behaviour may be the problem for you, but for the child, it’s an entirely different problem that is causing it.

The first and most important element of this is the child’s ability to read social situations and interpret other people’s feelings and emotions. When a child doesn’t understand the way other people are feeling, it’s easy to say or do the wrong thing; without the ability to understand the social framework of the situation, the right thing is difficult to understand or identify.

A secondary element – which dovetails with the first – is the child’s own ability to identify and manage emotions. When a child cannot see any way to deal with anger except by lashing out, it seems pointless to respond appropriately when someone else is angry – because what else would someone do except lash out? If they’re going to lash out anyway, it doesn’t matter… and when you combine oppositional behaviour with this, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The third and most important aspect is an understanding of problem solving. When a child is faced with a situation where choices must be made, it can be hard to know what the right choices are – and without some basic problem-solving skills, the child simply has no way to make a good choice. All the choices seem to be equally good (or bad), and the child just picks one.

With these three skills, a child can rapidly understand that there are choices in his behaviour when dealing with a social situation. Understanding how to handle one’s own emotions can help avoid the frustration and confusion of dealing with someone else’s emotions, and then the problem solving skills can come into play.

By understanding these three skills yourself, the situation can become markedly better. Many parents find that they spend much of their time looking angry or upset, and the child feels like the cause of this emotion. By simply expressing the target of your emotions, you can relieve this stress and anxiety for your child, and oppositional behaviour is likely to decrease or stop altogether.

And armed with these skills, your own life will improve, as well as your child’s.

To learn more about the root causes of oppositional behaviour, I highly recommend The Total Transformation Program, by James Lehman.