“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
– Albert Einstein
While every child has “ornery” moments, a child classified as defiant is a child who takes being ornery to the extraordinary. It is a child who takes autonomy to the extreme. Just like the skateboarder who simply uses his skateboard to skate down the sidewalk, and then switches to the extreme by flying off an eight-foot ledge and landing on a two-inch metal handrail. An attachment-challenged child is often seen to take defiance to this intensity. These children are often described as being extremely disobedient, exceedingly rebellious, overly insolent, and completely non-cooperative. They can demonstrate a refusal to being controlled by anybody and constantly test limits. Defiance is one of the classic symptoms on a child attachment checklist, usually being described as “oppositional, argumentative, defiant” and as a child with “extreme control problems.”
The typical prognosis by professionals for children and adolescents who do not work out their defiant behavior in their youth is often grim, at best. Professionals in the field of mental health often tell parents that disruptive behavior disorders can lead to a lifetime of problems. The problems they list include social dysfunction, anti-social behavior, and poor adjustment. They further expand on this by explaining that not only will these children suffer within themselves, but their families, peers, and society as a whole will suffer.
Parents seeking help for dealing with their defiant child often find themselves in a more severe situation after following the advice of professionals. A mother describes her situation:
We sought help for Joseph, our five year old, who was exceptionally defiant to even the simplest of requests. We sought the counsel of a behavioral analyst and used the intervention of ‘Extinction.’ We used this method when Joseph would refuse a request. We were instructed to stay focused only on the instruction given until Joseph conformed. He became completely oppositional and outraged with this intervention. At times, it would take Joseph up to three hours to follow a simple instruction such as putting on his shoes when it was time to go to the store. His response using this method switched from being just defiant to aggressive. It was so severe that he smashed a window with his bare hands, charged me with a pair of scissors, and threw heavy objects at me, intending to hurt me. It is disheartening and frightening to be following the advice of a well-known professional and to see our home become so out-of control.
Traditional View
Traditional professionals explain that the defiant behaviors from attachment- challenged children are an outward expression of the child’s internal intolerance of having other people’s limits placed upon them. These children are seen to be constantly testing, baiting, and pushing limits in an attempt to see what kind of a reaction they will receive from the adult in charge. Thus, parents are told that their child is in a constant battle for control of the environment.1 Parents are given strict counseling to stay in control and to especially stay in control of their own emotions.2 If the child manages to upset the parent, this puts the child back into control. In this view, it is crucial that parental anger be avoided.3 Emphasis is placed on the perception that the child must do what is asked by the parent in order for an appropriate parent-child relationship to develop.4
The defiant behaviors in these children can be either outright refusals to comply by choice5 or more covert in nature.6 Traditionally the child who complies readily with a parental instruction, yet “mistakenly forgets” or does not properly complete the task, is seen as manipulative and passive-aggressive. Thus, even when appearing to comply, the child is actually non-compliant – always “off by a hair.”7 When Jenny is asked to put the dishes in the dishwasher and “inadvertently” leaves one spoon in the sink, she is giving a message to her parents that she is doing what they have asked, but that she is not really doing what they have asked. Thus, Jenny is seen in the traditional model as passive-aggressive, maintaining control, and keeping her parents on the peripheral.8
One traditional approach is to have children complete their chores “fast and snappy, right the first time, Mom and Dad’s way.”9 If the child fails to comply in this manner, the response from the parent is to make a statement to the child that will make the child “think” in order to avoid control battles and to have the child become insightful. So when Jimmy is asked to mow the lawn prior to eating dinner and refuses or losses track of time, Mom can say to him, “Son, you are free to join your family for your next meal as long as the lawn is mowed.” The idea of this approach is that Jimmy then learns that there are choices in the “real world” and that he will have the opportunity to make the right choice next time.10
New View
As humans, we are a reactive species. When we experience an event that is unfamiliar to us, we will perceive that event as a threat until deemed otherwise. Our immediate reaction will almost always be that of a freeze reaction; we then determine whether to fight or flee – whether to enter into a hyper-aroused state or a hypo-aroused state. When applying this understanding to an oppositional-defiant child, it can be seen that the child is fundamentally a hypo-aroused child. A defiant child is essentially a scared child. A child in this hypo-aroused state, or shutdown state, has the potential for then moving swiftly into a hyper-aroused state, or aggressive state. Reflect on the example of Joseph, the five-year-old defiant child who was being forced through a behavioral technique to follow his parent’s directive. His mother described the situation as turning from defiance to aggression. While Joseph’s initial fear manifested itself into refusing behavior, this fear state was then fed with more fear by his mother’s reaction, quickly shifting Joseph into an aggressive, hyper-aroused state.
A defiant child
is essentially a
scared child.
For children with trauma histories, it can be any request from the parent that creates a feeling of threat. A parental request at any level (yes, simply being asked to take out the trash or simply to put on his shoes) can be one that shifts the child into a fear state due to perceiving the directive as a threat. Dependent on the history, this child may be actually terrified. In that moment, the child cannot determine whether the parent’s request is safe or not. He immediately goes into freeze mode, and then becomes defiant to the parent’s request. In that moment, the child has to be defiant. There is no other alternative.
The essence of defiance is fear. A child needs to be given emotional space and in many cases, physical space, to perceive that the request is not a threat. This is a traumatic stress issue. It is not an issue of the child working to control or manipulate the parent. It is not an issue of the child testing the limits or baiting the parent to see how he can make his parent become emotionally reactive. Defiance is a fundamental issue of feeling threatened and overwhelmed with fear.
After parents give a request, they need to step back and give the child space to process the fear. Giving children emotional space helps them to soothe and process their fear state, allowing them then to rationally interpret the request as safe. This is only effective if the parent is truly calm. Parents have to recognize and acknowledge their own internal reactions to their child’s defiant behaviors. Perhaps it is a reaction of feeling powerless, a feeling of being disrespected, or a feeling of fear of the child not developing an attachment to the parent. The parent needs to work to stay in a calm state in order to help the child then feel safe. Remember, the calmer amgydala has the ability to soothe the aroused amgydala.
There are several predictable areas of defiance for children with trauma histories. Some of these include transition, school-time, bath-time, bedtime, and homework. Let us take a look at each one of these particular areas with parenting examples to show how to help the child’s fear state be reduced and eventually eliminated.
Transition: Adopted children and children in foster care often demonstrate defiance around the issue of transition. These children need us to recognize that transitional stress is the result of early childhood experiences. For the newborn adopted at birth, the very first transition was being placed from the arms of his birth mother to the arms of his adoptive mother. For the two-year old, it happened when the caseworker arrived at the biological home and the child was driven away, never to return home again. For the eight year old who was removed from the orphanage by his adoptive parents after living in the same orphanage since birth, transitional trauma occurred amongst strangers who communicated in a different language. These are all examples of trauma around transition.
They are not
equipped to soothe
the overload of
stress that floods
their body-mind
systems at
nighttime.
The result is that these children in the above examples can have a negative association with any type of transition in the future. The child needs the parent to recognize and acknowledge that this is the fundamental dynamic behind the defiance. Reflecting back on Joseph, the five-year old, Mom could address this by saying, “Joseph, honey, can you please put your shoes on? We need to go to the store.” Joseph sits down on the floor, crosses his arms and says, “No.” Mom needs to reflect on the origin of this defiance and defensive posture. Recognizing that he indeed has early trauma around transition, Mom sits down on the floor, puts her arm around Joseph and says, “It must be really scary to leave our home, even to go to the store. It is going to be okay, honey. I am not going to let anything separate us when we are gone. I love you and we will be coming right back home.”
School-time: Many children, while not being out-right defiant like Joseph, demonstrate avoiding behaviors, or what appear to be more passive aggressive behaviors. Julie, a twelve-year old, constantly cannot get ready on time for school. Her mother is at her breaking edge seeing Julie “paddycaking” around in the morning instead of being focused on the morning tasks at hand. Julie needs her mother to recognize that this “putzing” behavior is a reflection of the fear that is ignited every morning when even thinking about going to school. In Julie’s case, she was taken from school because of abuse in her home, never to return home to be with her biological mother again. Thus, Julie revisits the fear of going to school and never coming home every morning when thinking about getting on her school bus. Giving consequences for this behavior, telling Julie she needs to make better choices in the morning, or taking away privileges will not address the sheer terror driving her behavior.
Bath-time: Children’s case files throughout the United States are filled with stories of abuse that occurred in the bathroom of the child’s home. In the case of international adoptions, children have related horror stories of being forced to take cold showers while living in the orphanage. Thus, defiance around bath-time routine is exceptionally common. Defiance at bath-time is trauma induced. Addressing this behavior through smell-good charts, placing the child in a different room (such as the laundry room) to eat, or any other technique designed to have the child make a better choice at bath-time11 disregards the unthinkable trauma that occurred in the child’s past.
After five years of battling it out with her daughter at bath-time, a mother relates the story of why bath-time was such a defiant time.
Once I was able to accept her struggle with taking a shower, I calmly offered to be with her in the bathroom and to be present with her in case she needed me. After taking the first shower without a tantrum in five long years, my daughter was finally able to share this with me: ‘Mom, the guy who sexually molested me used to make me take a shower with him.
Bedtime: Bedtime fears for traumatized children go far beyond the “Boogie Man” in the closet. Again, nighttime trauma experiences are pervasive for adopted and foster care children. Very real fears stem from nights of being sexually abused by fathers or uncles living in the home. Very real fears stem from being terrified of making a single noise in the orphanage with twenty-five other children as the orphanage worker stood guard. Very real fears stem from being removed from home in the middle of the night by a caseworker due to abuse allegations. Children need their parents to acknowledge and recognize these nighttime fears. They are not equipped to soothe the overload of stress that floods their body-mind systems at nighttime. Bedtime hassles are signs of stress overload, not of manipulation or defiance. Giving a child extra chores or a consequence for not adhering to a strict bed time12 misses the opportunity for the parent to soothe and help the child in his healing process.
A father writes:
Every night, night after night, my daughter would fiddle-faddle around at bedtime. She’d say she needed a drink of water. She’d aimlessly walk around the house. She’d always need one more thing from me. Then, when she did go to bed, she would always leave the hall light on. I had asked her at least fifty times to turn that light off. I was at my wits end until I realized that this behavior was simply a communication of something deeper. When I finally sat with her one night, calm and open to her process, I asked her what made it so difficult to go to bed at night. She said, ‘I don’t like the dark, daddy. It scares me that when I wake up in the morning you won’t be here. I’m so scared you’ll be dead.’ Then I reflected on how her mother died three years ago from a brain hemorrhage in the middle of the night.
Homework: Children with trauma histories often have immediate reactions to even the thought of doing homework. Parents need to recognize this as fear – not as defiance – in order to stop the cycle of negative repetitious conditioning. Forcing the child to sit and do his homework by giving him a choice of finishing the homework and then having playtime or making him sit until he decides he is “ready” is unproductive and creates more fear in the child for the next day. Saying that homework is 100 percent the child’s responsibility and having the attitude that each school grade is available to the child for as many times as needed13 does not address the child’s inability to self-soothe when faced with fear.
Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, explains that “students who are anxious, angry, or depressed don’t learn; people who are caught in these states do not take in information efficiently or deal with it well.”14 So instead of pushing the child and forcing learning to happen, thereby creating negative repetitious conditioning and more fear, the parent’s new understanding is that the child simply cannot learn in this emotional state. The new view allows the parent to work to attend to the unconscious fear by saying, “I know that it really scares you to think about doing your homework. Everyday when it is time to do homework, you look like you’re in a total panic, sweetheart.” The parent’s responsibility is to help shift the child out of the state of fear by talking to the child and working to uncover the fear that is driving these resistant behaviors. Perhaps it is the expectation of being perfect in order to be loved instead of being abandoned, as in the past. The child’s unconscious is saying, “If I’m perfect, then I’m lovable. If I’m lovable, then I’m safe. If I’m safe, then I won’t be hurt anymore. I’ve got to be perfect.” This type of unconscious thought becomes so overwhelming and produces so much stress that the cognitive brain is unable to think logically. The child becomes so overwhelmed with the need to be perfect that the thinking brain literally becomes inaccessible. So, the parent says, “I love you and I’m here forever for you. Your homework does not determine your place in this family. Tell me how scary homework is for you.”
Scenario: Peter is a 14 year olda who was hospitalized just last week for violently acting out and threatening to kill his younger brother. Dad comes home after an evening out to find chocolate syrup on the counter top and on the floor. He walks in and sees Peter watching TV and eating an ice cream sundae. Dad asks Peter to clean up his mess in the kitchen and Peter responds, “Man, I’m busy watching my show. You’re always picking on me.”
Traditional View
Dad remembers that his therapist has stressed the importance of the child being respectful to the parent at all times, especially after being allowed back into the home from the hospital. Peter is clearly being disrespectful to his father. Dad also remembers that his goal as Peter’s parent is not to stop his child’s behavior in so much as it is to lower the negative impact on the parents’ lives.15 Thus, the best approach to such a disrespectful response from Peter would be to simply remove the one who is impacting the family negatively – Peter. Dad has an “on-call” respite caretaker, whom he then calls to pickup Peter immediately. When the respite worker arrives at the home twenty minutes later, Dad calmly and matter-of-factly tells Peter he will be going with Ms. Jane. Peter is given no explanation, and Dad knows he does not need to defend his parenting decision. 16 Peter leaves the home for two days and, when asked if he would like to return home, it is made clear that Peter will need to respect his father in order to be part of the family. This follows the basic belief of the traditional approach that being a part of a family makes a child feel good. Thus, the next time Peter is given a parental directive, he will be more inclined to make the right choice and respectfully respond to the directive.
A New View
First, Dad realizes that a fourteen year old who leaves syrup on the counter top and on the floor is not really a fourteen year old, but more of a five year old. Second, Dad takes a deep breath and considers his own stress that he is bringing into the interaction with his son (stress from work, stress from having to pay for the hospital stay, etc.). Third, Dad realizes that Peter was recently released from the hospital and is certainly hypersensitive to the threat of being returned to the hospital. Dad takes a few deep breaths, processes the dynamics listed above, and walks into the living room again. Dad puts his arm around Peter this time and says, “When you’re through with your show, could you please come in the kitchen and clean up?” Dad gives Peter a loving one-armed hug and walks away from Peter. (Dad is giving Peter the physical and emotional space he needs to determine that Dad’s request is safe and is not a threat.) At the first commercial, Peter gets up and walks into the kitchen, cleans up his mess, and goes back to finish his show. Dad thanks Peter for cleaning up and they both go to bed peacefully. The next morning, Dad and Peter are sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast. Dad senses that Peter is calm, so Dad initiates a conversation regarding Peter’s first response the previous night. Dad says, “Peter, last night when I walked in and found the syrup all over the kitchen, it was frustrating for me. Then, when I asked you to clean it up, you were quite reactive to me. I know that it was scary going to that hospital last week, and you’re scared you’ll have to go back again, but I’d appreciate it if you could be more respectful to me. Okay, Son?” Peter lowers his head in shame for being disrespectful, and says, “Okay, Dad.” Dad reassures Peter he is not going back to the hospital and reconnects with his son physically and emotionally to give him safety and comfort.
Quick Reference DEFIANCE
Remember that defiance:
When discovering this behavior, recognize that your child needs you to: