How to Handle Oppositional Behavior

Having an oppositional, explosive, defiant, or otherwise challenging child is beyond frustrating and demoralizing. Parenting feels so hard. We wonder “where did I go wrong?” and blame our bad parenting. We wonder “what is wrong with him?” and blame our child. This blame feels terrible and it doesn’t point to any solutions. 

We resolve again and again not to yell, threaten, or overreact but too often we find ourselves going down these destructive paths. So what do we do to break this terrible cycle of power struggles?

The next time you are faced with oppositional, defiant, explosive, or tantruming behavior from your child, try keeping in mind Ross Greene’s (author of The Explosive Child) important mantra: “Kids Do Well if They Can.” It helps you stay positive and keep your cool.

According to Greene, the typical view of child misbehavior is that kids do well if they want to. In this view, defiance and power struggles mean that our child doesn’t want to cooperate with us. It feels like our child is intentionally disrespecting us, rejecting our authority, and demonstrating a lack of concern about our feelings and needs. It feels like they don’t want to get along with us, that they’d rather fight. This provokes very strong feelings of anger at our child’s disrespect, anxiety about their future (“What’s it going to be like when he or she is a teenager?”), and self-criticism about our parenting (“I’m a failure as a parent”). It’s extremely difficult to remain calm, constructive and solution focused in the face of all of these intense feelings.

Greene suggests we instead look at our child’s behavior through the lens of “Kids Do Well if They Can.” If we do, we’ll think “my child wants to get along with me and please me, but there is something getting in the way that makes it so that he or she can’t.” Looked at through this lens, our child’s misbehavior becomes a sign of our child’s distress and that he or she needs our help and support. Opposition no longer feels like a personal affront. This new view makes it much easier to remain calm and focus on identifying and solving the problem that lies behind the apparent defiance. (Skip to the end of the blog to find resources for helping kids gain the skills they need to cooperate.)

Here are some questions you can ask yourself the next time you feel like your child doesn’t want to cooperate. It will help you see him or her in a more positive light.

Does my child lack the skills needed to comply with my request?

Most explosive kids are behind their peers in the development of executive functioning skills. Executive functioning (EF) are the skills that enable us to deal effectively with the basic demands of everyday life. Here’s a list from understood.org of signs that a child has problems with EF:

• Have trouble starting and/or completing tasks

• Have difficulty prioritizing tasks

• Forget what they just heard or read

• Have trouble following directions or a sequence of steps

• Panic when rules or routines change

• Have trouble switching focus from one task to another

• Get overly emotional and fixate on things

• Have trouble organizing their thoughts

• Have trouble keeping track of their belongings

• Have trouble managing their time

For example, kids with executive functioning problems have a very difficult time transitioning from one activity to another. The classic case is the parent who asks their child to stop playing a video game and come to dinner, but the child continues to play. Before you know it, it escalates to the parent pulling the game’s plug out of the wall. In Greene’s language, it looks like the kid doesn’t want to stop playing the game, but really the main point is that the child actually lacks the executive functioning skills to stop what they are doing, manage their frustration, and then shift their attention to dinner. Other places you might see executive functioning problems masquerading as oppositional behavior are kids who don’t do what they have been asked to do (and said yes to) because they forgot or misunderstood what was asked of them. Or kids who lose things, don’t organize their schoolwork, or fail to turn in assignments.

Does my child’s opposition in this moment actually reflect a strength in their character that I value?

A third grader that I worked with kept getting in trouble with his teacher because he wouldn’t transition to social studies at the end of math time. Instead the child would ignore the teacher and continue working on the math. The teacher saw this as oppositional behavior. It turned out that the child had a slower work pace and couldn’t complete the math work in the allotted time, but it was very important to him to not turn in incomplete work. Not stopping the math work looked like opposition, but it in fact was a manifestation of a healthy work ethic: he wanted to do a good, complete job on the math work.

Am I unintentionally creating the opposition?

I have had times when I was busy with the demands of work and life and I wasn’t making time for positive connections with my children. I reduced our interactions to only being about me making demands on them: do your homework, or get to bed. No one likes to be bossed around; it actually creates the opposition we don’t want. Furthermore, in my distracted state, the only sure way for them to get my full passionate attention was to get in a power-struggle with me. It’s negative attention, but kids would rather have negative attention than no attention at all. Psychologist John Gottman recommends aiming for five positive interactions with your child for every negative one (examples of negative interactions include demands, criticisms, or losing one’s temper). This “magic ratio” of 5 to 1 positive to negative interactions improves closeness and trust in the relationship and decreases opposition.

Am I believing my child when he or she says “I don’t care” after doing something wrong?

A frequent situation occurs when one child physically hurts a sibling. This is upsetting enough for parents, but we go through the roof when we confront them and they say “I don’t care.” It’s not that difficult to accept siblings fighting, but it’s really scary when your child seems coolly unconcerned about hurting a brother or sister, like he or she is some kind of little sociopath. I’ve heard many kids say that they didn’t care about hurting another person, or about doing something else wrong, but I’ve never found one who really meant it. When they say they don’t care they are actually saying something like “I feel so terrible about myself and what I have done that I can’t even think about it, let alone acknowledge it.” In these circumstances it’s best to assume that the child does care and to give him or her time to calm down. When you approach the child later, in a non-scolding way, they will be much more open to acknowledging how their behavior was hurtful.

Is this anxiety instead of opposition?

Sometimes a child will oppose our request because they are very anxious. It can be confusing because many times these children don’t look anxious. They aren’t expressing worry, caution or timidity. They are raging, exploding and fighting. I often explain this to parents by telling the following story. After I graduated from college I went to Paris to visit a friend from school. He and his two roommates lived in an attic apartment at the top of his building. One night they suggested that we go out on the roof. I imagined a roof deck, but what I found was a small flat area with no railing. To get there you had to walk about 10 feet along the narrow top cap of a steep pitched roof. All I could visualize was losing my balance as I walked across the roof and falling to my death on the street six stories below. Although I wanted to enjoy the view and relax on the roof, I was terrified. They tried to encourage me, “It’s easy. It’s safe. They do it all the time. I’ll love it.” No matter what they said, I wouldn’t budge and I got angrier and angrier the more they tried to push me. If they had tried to force me, I would have fought them. So remember, what looks like opposition — as in my case — is often fear. Even if it isn’t obvious to us why our child is afraid, or there doesn’t seem to us that there is anything to be afraid of.

Does my child need some time to process my request?

Many people, especially males, are easily stressed out by emotional conversations or by demands being made of them. They might not show it on the outside, but inside their emotions are rising and they can’t really listen. Marital and family researcher, John Gottman, calls this “diffuse physiological arousal” (DPA). DPA is the surge of feeling a husband feels in sitcoms when the wife says “we need to talk.” DPA is particularly a problem for people who process information more slowly than others. I have worked with many kids over the years who get angry and yell “no” when their parents make simple requests of them like “you need to clean up your room before you go to your friend’s house later.” With these DPA kids, they are initially overwhelmed by the demand, but often will eventually do what is asked, provided that the parents don’t push it or escalate things. In fact, for some kids, I have found that if their parents text requests to them it can go much better. The request over text is easier for the child to process than a face to face encounter and there is no rush for a response. 

The next time you are faced with oppositional or defiant or rude behavior from your child, try to keep in mind “kids do well if they can” to help you not overreact to the behavior and end up escalating things. Repeating this mantra and exploring the alternative explanations for the power struggle will make it easier to remain calm and focused on finding a solution. 

When considering how to solve the problems lying behind oppositional and defiant behavior, I recommend the following books as a place to start:

Ross Greene, The Explosive Child

Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen

Jeffrey Bernstein, 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child

If you need professional help, find a psychologist near you by searching the American Psychological Association’s directory.