039: What to do when your toddler says “No, I don’t wanna…!”

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Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  Now it’s no secret that I do some episodes of the podcast altruistically for you, dear listeners, because I’m not facing the situation that I’m studying – or at least not yet.  (Eyebrows were raised in our house when I started researching the impact of divorce on children but luckily for me I don’t need that episode…yet…) But today’s episode is for me, and you guys are just along for the ride.  Because, friends, we are in the thick of what I now know to be called “oppositional defiance,” otherwise known as “Noooo! I don’t wanna [insert activity here]”.  There’s actually an oppositional defiant disorder that’s described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is more commonly known as the DSM-5, because it’s in its fifth revision.  And I should say that the DSM is not infallible and is susceptible to societal trends – homosexuality was defined as a mental disorder in the DSM until 1973.  But right now Oppositional Defiant Disorder is in the DSM, and it’s defined as having four of a list of eight symptoms which fall into three major buckets: 1. Angry or irritable mood, 2. Argumentative or defiant behavior, and 3. Vindictiveness.  And before you think “wait, I think I fit those characteristics some days” I should point out that it’s the persistence and frequency of these behaviors that should be used to distinguish behavior that is within normal limits from behavior that is symptomatic.  For children younger than 5 years, the behavior should occur on most days for a period of at least six months, and for children older than 5 years it should be at least once a week for at least six months.  There are additional critieria around whether the behavior is associated with distress in a particular setting or if it impacts negatively on social or educational outcomes.  I’ll put the link to the detailed critieria in the references in case you’re worried that your child might meet them, but today we’re going to talk about the non-clinical kind of oppositional defiance that can still be incredibly frustrating to deal with. According to one group of researchers, “few periods in development are more important than when parents’ attempts to control and socialize children emerge in the second year,” so as you might expect, we’re going to need to sort through quite a bit of conflicting information. So let’s start with why all this is important and, funnily enough, it actually goes back to the episodes we’ve done on culture – our second episode (which was the first real episode of the show, after the introductory one) was on how culture impacts our parenting and we just dived into that topic again recently with the episode on the book Generation:Me.  I’m going to read a short paragraph from a paper on compliance and defiance in early childhood: “Lay persons and researchers agree that compliance with parents is critical to child development.  Parents report that obedience is a principal childrearing objective, and researchers emphasize that compliance facilitates the development of morality, self-regulation, and a range of social competences.  When parents elicit compliance, they integrate children into interactions that help children regulate their emotions, internalize prosocial behavior, and in general coordinate their intentions and actions with the intentions and actions of others.  In contrast, noncompliance is often considered a marker for poor parent-child relationships, poor internalization of prosocial values, and increased likelihood of serious behavior problems.”  Now I was actually really surprised to see that both parents and researchers put so much emphasis on children complying with parental requests, especially since we learned in the Generation:Me episode that parents in this generation put a premium on encouraging children to think for themselves, which seems to contradict the emphasis on obedience we’re seeing here – unless, I suppose, your child learns to think for himself or herself and decides by himself (or herself) that you are right and of course they should obey you.  But researchers now understand that strong parent agency and strong child agency are not incompatible – in other words, both parties can have some control in the relationship, although who has what control and how it is asserted have be renegotiated over and over again as the child gets older.  In our culture, the child’s power assertion can be seen as having a positive role – the child not only learns how to negotiate, but also that it is possible in the first place to take initiative and oppose what the child sees as injustice.  Most of us want our children to learn that protesting what a person thinks of as unfair is fine as long as the protest itself isn’t defiant or antisocial in its character, so our challenge is to induce compliance where we need it while demonstrating that we are open to negotiation where the request is reasonable. Part of the reason that these conflicts occur seems to be that the child reaches an age where they realize that they actually can assert their own opinion right at the same time as the parents realize that the child isn’t just a baby any more, but should start to learn about some of the social conventions that make both the family work as a unit and the child function successfully in the wider world.  So the child wants to assert their own ideas but the parents either want their child to behave in a certain way, or see that other people around the family want the child to behave in a certain way, then the stage is set for disagreements.  But I think we can agree that even if we value independent thinking there are times when we want our children to just do what we ask them to do, for goodness sake, so let’s talk about the factors involved in gaining that compliance. The very highly regarded child psychologist Diana Baumrind described three types of relationships that parents can have with their children.  The first is a permissive relationship, where parents are reluctant to discipline and avoid dealing with their children’s problematic behavior.  It’s pretty well established at this point that an authoritative relationship between parents and children is good for kids, at least if you are White.  If you’re a regular listener you might recall having heard this term before; authoritative parents allow some give and take, provide reasons when they make demands of children, and are open to negotiation.  They provide a loving and warm relationship although they are not afraid to set limits when limits are needed.  And I say that this is the best style if you’re White because the vast majority of research on parenting styles has been done on White children with White parents, but some research shows that an authoritarian style, which is where parents have high demands but provide little in the way of feedback and nurturance and may also be coercive and make threats toward their children.  White children tend not to do well with authoritarian parents but Black children actually fare better.  Authoritative parenting might still be best, but authoritarian parenting is OK. So that said, researchers have been curious to find out whether parents that have an authoritative relationship (which, as a reminder, is the “good” kind of relationship) with their children experience more or less conflict.  Relationship theories say that when children form secure, affectionate, reciprocal relationships with their parents then they’re more likely to want to please their parents and comply with their parents’ wishes.  So if parents are warm, sensitive, and non-coercive, then children will cooperate most of the time and not be defiant very often, and this has been supported by research as well.  Now this is troubling to me, of course, because I think I’ve worked pretty hard to develop a warm, sensitive, non-coercive relationship with my daughter and she still puts up a fight when it’s time to get dressed pretty much every damn morning. But let’s set that aside for a minute and look at another set of processes in a child’s development that are also important, and those are the emerging sense of autonomy and self-efficacy.  The researchers in this camp observe that a child doesn’t say “Noooo I don’t wanna get dressed” just because she wants to be obstinate but because she wants to be autonomous and control what happens in her life.  They think that where parents avoid exerting too much control over their children and allow the child to take the lead, the child learns that their wants and actions control events around them. So one group of researchers decided to try to test which of these apparently contradictory theories was mostly responsible for defiant resistance.  They thought that if young children resist being controlled primarily because their relationship with their mother isn’t very good, then even when control is not an issue, “defiant” children may display negative behavior toward their mothers.  But on the other hand, if young children resist being controlled because they have a strong sense of autonomy, then when control isn’t an issue, “defiant” children may display more positive behavior toward their mothers.  They conducted an experiment where mothers and children in a lab setting were put in a room with some things like a pair of eyeglasses and a jug of water with some paper cups that needed parental supervision to use.  There were also some toys that the mother and child were to play with together, as well as some attractive toys that the child wasn’t allowed to touch, and at the end of 15 minutes playing the researcher asked the mother to get the child’s help with cleaning up.  The researchers recorded the interactions between the mothers and children and coded those to analyze them.  It turns out that the more defiance children displayed, the more they initiated positive interaction with their mothers.  So among children who initiated a lot of positive interactions, 54% were also high in defiance, and among children who didn’t initiate a lot of positive interactions, only 21% were high in defiance.  Children who smiled more at their mothers and initiated positive interactions with their mothers were significantly more likely to display both high defiance (behavior like taking more toys of the box at clean-up time) and low passive non-compliance (which is behavior like just standing by while the mothers did the cleaning up).  The researchers also timed how long it took children to initiate positive interactions and display defiant noncompliance at cleanup time, and the more quickly children initiated positive interactions, the more they displayed defiant noncompliance. So why does this happen?  Why are positive relationships with a parent linked to more defiant behavior?  The researchers hypothesized that because sensitive mothers adapt to children’s signals, use noncoercive forms of control and allow children to control the social interaction, their children may develop strong autonomy motivation, the belief that they can control events, and expectations that their mothers will respond favorably when the children assert their needs.  And children who exhibit strong defiance may elicit something from parents that helps children to develop ways to resolve frustration and reconcile conflict – things like rules around social interactions, the fact that others have feelings and needs that should be respected, and potential actions that can be taken to cooperate with parents.  A variety of researchers think that children who are securely attached to their parents feel comfortable enough with those parents to be less compliant; it’s the ones that aren’t comfortable with their parents who are compliant because they’re afraid to be defiant.  What isn’t yet well understood is whether children benefit when parents tolerate defiant behavior or try to inhibit it, but researchers do think that while defiant behavior is a hallmark of problematic development a few years after toddler-hood, there’s no indication that defiance in toddlerhood is linked to problems later in life. OK, so we now have some evidence that just having a toddler who is defiant doesn’t mean we’re terrible parents (perhaps we should all carry a card with the link for this episode on it that we can give to strangers who give us snarky looks when our child pitches a fit out in public.).  But what are we supposed to do when our child doesn’t do what we ask? One set of researchers that are focused on parental interventions based on behavioral management train parents to minimize their use of disciplinary reasoning and instead respond to noncompliance with a series of increasingly forceful tactics to assert their power – things like commands, then single warnings, then time-outs.  The idea is that children eventually learn that if they’re being given a command and they refuse now, they’re going to eventually get a time-out so they might as well just obey the command now.  But the research supporting this approach is largely based on children who have behavior “problems” that the parents perceive as so severe that the children have been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder or its relative conduct disorder, and it’s not at all clear to me that these approaches are suitable for children who have not been clinically diagnosed with these disorders.  Secondly, since these tactics are among the more common ones parents tend to use to gain compliance in the first place, it seems not inconceivable that the breakdown in relationship that may have occurred as a result of the parent’s frequent use of power to gain compliance might be in part responsible for the “disorder” in the first place. Professor Wendy Grolnick has done a lot of research on a different approach; one of her major interests is on self-determination theory so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised where her results land in this arena.  Self-Determination Theory is the idea that humans have a need to feel as though they have control over their lives, and that they are competent, and that they are connected to and valued by people who are important to them.  So self-determination theorists believe that acknowledging the child’s perspectives, providing choice, displaying empathy, and engaging in joint problem solving helps to build not only a positive relationship between parent and child, but also the child’s own feelings of control, competence, and connectedness.  And if these strategies for gaining compliance sort of sound vaguely familiar to you then they should, because they are *exactly * the kinds of strategies that are described in the book How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen, which we discussed with the co-author Julie King back in episode 22 of the podcast.  So now we understand a little more clearly that the strategies Julie and her coauthor Joanna Faber describe aren’t pulled out of thin air; they’re actually grounded in research about how children develop a sense of control, competence, and connecteness. We can look at parental authority in the light of characteristics like empathy, competence, and connectedness and try to understand what about parental authority – where it’s not forced or coercive – makes it helpful to children.  Professor Grolnick argues that when parents provide clear and consistent expectations about behavior, and predictable consequences, children understand how their actions lead to success or failure, which helps them to feel both in control and competent.  By contrast, when parents just assert power over children as a means of gaining compliance, that power isn’t connected to any need that the *child* has but rather just the *parent’s* need for the child’s compliance, so it doesn’t help the child to learn or develop. Parents might also wonder “well, should I reward the behavior I want to see to try to get my child to do more of that and less of the behavior I don’t like?”  And Professor Grolnick’s answer would be “well you can, and if the reward is unexpected then that’s fine because the child didn’t have to do a certain thing to get the reward (which sort of defeats the point a bit).”  But rewards that are contingent on performing a particular behavior control the child but don’t support the child’s competence, and also undermine the child’s intrinsic motivation to comply in the future.  So if