We're back to thinking about discipline this week (and I could probably go on for weeks to come, so stop me when you get bored, 'kay?). Before we get into specific discipline strategies, I wanted to give you a bit more background about some of the research that's gone into understanding the development of defiant behaviour. In particular, I want to focus today's post on the most common parent-child interaction pattern that's associated with the development of oppositional, defiant and/or aggressive behaviour. There are SO MANY studies that have focused on this deceptively simple pattern, often referred in the research literature as "coercion" or the "coercive cycle." The pattern was first documented and analyzed by researchers from the Oregon Social Learning Center, most notably by Gerald Patterson (my academic mentor's mentor, a brilliant and inspiring man, and one of the most interesting and awesome people I know). Patterson collected videotapes of hundreds of parents and children interacting with one another in their own homes. And here's one of the most common interaction patterns he identified…
The coercive cycle starts with a parent requesting something of her child — let's say, mom asks her child to put away the blocks he's been playing with. The child responds by either ignoring mom or saying "NO!" The parent then responds to this defiance by escalating her request (either by increasing the urgency with which she delivers her request, raising her voice, threatening to take away privileges or threatening to punish, etc.). The child continues to refuse to comply (either actively or passively, but either way, he's not budging). Mom again escalates her request. The child then starts to whine (eeh gad that whiiiiiiiiiiiine), scream, cry or tantrum. The mother gives up: utterly exhausted at this point and realizing how much easier it would be to just pick up the darn blocks herself.
Who among us has not experienced almost this precise interaction? Who among us has not been frustrated enough, sleep-deprived, exhausted after a full day at work, desperate enough for a little peace that we have just given up? Sometimes we need to just pick our battles, right? Right… to a certain degree.
Here's the problem: This little scenario happens to ALL of us, at some point. But the OPPORTUNITY for this type of interaction happens hundreds of times over the course of a week (and often over the course of a DAY). And each little episode teaches the child something (as well as the parent). For the child, he learns that if he ignores long enough, whines loud enough, or full-out tantrums quickly enough, he will get his way. This is the "coercive" part of the cycle. The parent is ALSO learning something: Mom learns that if she gives up quickly enough, then peace and quiet will be restored to the household. In "behaviourists'" terms, both the child's "coercive" behaviour and the parent's withdrawing behaviour is being reinforced by this scenario. What is compelling about this situation is that, in some ways, it is so banal, so innocuous. In the moment, the interaction doesn't seem like a big deal at all. In the short run, both the parent and child are actually coming out the other end of this feeling relatively relieved and alright. BUT! Wash, rinse and repeat hundreds and thousands of times and, in the LONG RUN, we've just created a potential little tyrant, one that now whines at EVERY. SINGLE. REQUEST. One that throws himself on the floor screaming and flailing each and every time we say "no" to one of HIS requests.
A few more points to emphasize about the coercive cycle:
1. When I say that the child is being "coercive," I don't mean that she is INTENTIONALLY and CONSCIOUSLY doing something to piss off her parents. These patterns develop outside of consciousness — which is part of the reason they can be so tricky…
2. For almost all children and parents, these mini-conflict scenarios start emerging most notably at around 18 months and continue on through early childhood. As we've talked about already, oppositional and defiant behaviour is COMPLETELY normal at this age. It's what we DO about it, as parents, that really matters.
3. Between 2 – 4 years old, these behavioural issues may not seem so serious (and they're not, at this stage). Children are small, can't do much damage, and their defiance can be relatively contained (and kinda funny too). But the trouble is that if we DON'T start attending to the defiant and aggressive behaviour early on, these are the skills and strategies that our children will take with them into the classroom, playground and into the homes of their peers as they get older.
SOURCES: There's loads of data I can link to that has identified the coercive cycle as a strong causal process that leads to the development of oppositional and/or aggressive behaviour. Here are just two of the summary articles that pull together this large body of research: Hinshaw, 2002 and Kazdin, 2002. If you're interested in the actual original studies, email me and I'll send you a few. Here's my own review of the research literature in the area (although I do NOT recommend reading it unless you're really into esoteric modeling, dense and inaccessible writing and the application of complexity/chaos theory to psychology). Perhaps the best two books on the topic — with all the data and theory summarized — are authored or co-authored by Patterson.
So… do you recognize the "coercive" cycle in your family? How about in other families that you see around you? Are there strategies you use to try to avoid these scenarios? Under what circumstances do you find it almost impossible to avoid these situations (I'll tell you mine in the comments if you tell me yours…)?
So thankful for these disciplinary posts! Yes, I think the example in the post is something EVERYONE has experienced and so common. I’m not great at not getting into this coercive cycle about food with my 2 year old, but this example is something that I’m proud of in how we deal with it: When my son says, “no”, I try asking in a different way. Some of my favorites: “Let’s pick up the toys together”, “How many toys can you pick up and put away?” and then we count or, “Can you put away the blue blocks?”, or “hand the blue blocks to mommy to put in the box”. He’s really into playing football or hitting golf balls, so I often say, “Let’s put away the toys (or “Let’s clear the field”) before we play football or golf” Now, he even initiates it after he’s done playing with a certain thing.
I’m not certain how to deal with it when it comes to food. I know my goal: NOT TO BECOME A SHORT ORDER CHEF, but also know that my kid doesn’t know when he’s hungry. I try not to care, but when he’s throwing a tantrum and I know that it is because he needs food, but doesn’t want anything that I suggest, it is hard. Sometimes it takes distracting him with anything and then feeding him. I haven’t gotten to the age where I can say, “Kitchen closed” if you don’t like your dinner, tough, because I feel like he’s not there yet developmentally. I just feel like he can’t yet recognize that he’s hungry, or tired for that matter. I like the explanation in a book by Ames, “They sometimes seem to exist on crackers and air” and this gets me by most of the time.
Oh, and I forgot to add, I have a pretty aggressive 2 year old. We went through the 18-22 month age with no language and he would bite, scratch, hit…oh it was awful. Since the explosion of language, it has become much better, but a session with the mommy mentor, http://www.mommymentor.net, was worth its weight in gold. If he is aggressive, we say, “You hit, you sit” and make him sit for 10 seconds or so, then we tell him what we would want him to do instead, like share or pet the dog or say it with words…” and then kiss him. The point is that it is teaching rather than punishment. and the point is that it is something that you have to repeat, and repeat, and repeat and repeat. I know that he will grow out of this working for him sometime soon…and it doesn’t always work since now he’s scared of the dogs… ug.
I felt lucky that my daughter was highly verbal at 18 mo so we got through most of that stage without too much chaos… She is just about 2.5 now, and we are getting tons more “no, I don’t want it… I WANT IT!” also, she is saying no constantly. I find distraction still works – I mostly divert her attention by totally changing the subject and asking her what music we should listen to, etc. She loves certain
songs so looking forward to hearing them always makes her so happy.
I never try to coerce her around food because I had eating issues when I was a teen, so I make sure to let her have as much control as she can around food. I also never use food as a reward or a distraction if I can help it. She will go without knowingly eating veggies for days – I mix purée into her mac & cheese or whatever she will eat – but then overload on veggies some days , so I am glad that it works out and isn’t a battle.
She is absolutely starting to refuse to clean up toys… I am working on my response to that right now so this is timely!
My daughter is 17 months old now. Just in the past few weeks, she’s started with the defiance and it is driving me crazy. I still tell myself she’s too young to pick up blocks by herself but I try to have her help me. Sometimes that means I literally pick up the block, hand it to her, then point her to the box to put it in. So yeah, that takes about 5x as long as it would for me to pick up the stupid blocks. Reading this is good, it reminds me that it is one of my jobs to have her help me with the blocks and learn life lessons while doing so.
Thanks for these discipline posts. I say keep ‘em coming! The more info the better as far as I’m concerned.
Like @Shelby the ‘Can you help me/ Let me help you put the toys away?’, ‘We have to put everything away before we can go to the park/watch a dvd/have that icecream’ works like a charm with my 5 year old and to a lesser degree with my 3 year old. Now the 5 year old actually puts toys away himself before asking me to get something else out of the cupboard for him. So I know this approach actually works and will work eventually with the 3 year old.
As far as eating, we don’t have too many problems. It’s more the actual getting to the table that is the hard part. At breakfast time I have actually had to resort to not letting my 3y.o have what I call her ‘follow up’( the handful of bran she likes to gnaw on after she has finished her wheatbix) becasue time is limited. I think it is starting to sink in that she has to get to the table, finish her milk and wheatbix all before 8, before she can get the ‘follow up’. A couple of times she missed out as she was too slow (read wasting time)getting to the table for breakfast.
My biggest problem is actully getting the 3 year old to walk. Her brother was a champion walker at her age, but she will walk 10 steps and say she is tired and ask to be carried. I have to bring the stroller everywhere, becasue otherwise I end up having to haul the child around in my arms. She does not pull this stunt with anyone else, mind you. During the holidays she walked heaps, simply because Dad came along and held her hand/pulled her along with him. With me she plonks herself down in the middle of the footpath and doesn’t budge. I rely on making a game of everything: ‘come on, hold my hand and run with mummy’, or sometimes (like today) ‘let’s see if someone has had a birthday at kinder and there are sweets’ . Today for the first time she walked to kinder and back again, a whole 2 kms!!!
So, how do you avoid the cycle? Just not give in? I have a 13 month old who is strong willed atlready. I can only imagine what is going to happen in a few months.
@Shelby: We’ve got some food-related posts in the hopper… I’m hoping they’ll address some of your concerns. LOTS of my discipline issues were around food at the 18-22 month stage (nothing would tick me off more than when the boys would purposely throw the food I took tons of time to make — as much my problem as it was theirs, I think). Also… I love the mommy mentor’s take on descipline — the teach rather than punish angle is one I wholeheartedly endorse. We’ll get into that approach more when we get to specific strategies and hopefully you can share a bit more of your experience with this approach.
You’re absolutely right, that’s the $10,000,000 question: how do you avoid the cycle? I’ll get to some of those strategies in the next post or 2 (or 10) — there’s lots of different ideas, depending on the child’s age, temperament, etc. that we can talk about.
@paola: I’m having the exact same challenge: getting the boys to the table to eat breakfast in time so we can get to school on time. I’m starting to think that it’s my planning problem and I’m considering waking them up 15 min earlier so they have more lead-up to breakfast (they’re so much happier and compliant on the weekends when I’m not rushing them).
@T: WHAT?! You came for actual SOLUTIONS to the discipline issues instead of all this description of the problem?
Oh, you’ve hit one of my biggest worries right on the head. I don’t want to raise a little tyrant! But she is so much more stubborn than me. This is actually why I choose my battles carefully, because I try to only fight the battles that I’ll fight to the end. For instance, she has to brush her teeth every morning and every night. If she refuses, one of us will literally force the issue. She tests us on this periodically.
Basically, my approach is I only escalate if I’m willing to take the fight to the end. Otherwise, I cave right away. I hope that isn’t too terrible of an approach.
We do a lot of “make this chore into a game”, too. Currently, getting her to wash hands before dinner involves me marching down the hall with her saying “hut, 2, 3, 4, hut, 2, 3, 4″. It is crazy.
On the food thing- I am actually insistent that this NOT become a battle in my house. I was a picky eater, and still am to a certain extent. I can tell you from personal experience that coercion didn’t work. Neither did reason (I once stopped eating pizza because my parents told me the spaghetti sauce I wouldn’t eat was the same sauce as was on pizza). I’ve actually got a blog post about the picky eating thing and our approach, if anyone is interested:
http://wandsci.blogspot.com/2008/11/confessions-of-picky-eater.html
One thing we’ve noticed- there is absolutely no way to make my daughter try something new for the first time. Basically, she’ll do it when she’s ready. But once she’s tried something and doesn’t dislike it, we can often get her to eat more of it by saying things like “you can have more Cheerios once you finish your fruit”. I’m a bit conflicted about using food as a reward for eating other food, but we decided that as long as we kept things matter of fact and didn’t make it a big deal, it was OK.
Oh, @Shelby, one other thing on the food- I personally can absolutely melt down if I get too hungry, and it can degenerate pretty quickly even now, as a supposedly mature adult. It is like I can’t stop the grumpiness and make myself just go eat some crackers, dammit.
Anyway, until your son gets smarter than I am, you can try to learn to recognize the early warning signs and offer a cracker or something to get you through. This is what we do with my daughter, who has apparently inherited ALL of my bad eating traits. I also schedule snacks between meals for this reason. So even if she won’t eat her lunch, there is another chance at food just a couple of hours away- she doesn’t have to make it through until dinner.
And I forgot the true confessions part of this… our biggest fail is probably around toy clean up. I know that I need to work with her to teach her to do this herself, but I’m often trying to get it done on a deadline (as in the cleaner is coming tomorrow and we need all the toys put away tonight). These two things together combine to make this the area where I’m most likely to get in that coercive cycle. I’ll usually try to get her to do enough that I can cave and still save face and tell myself I didn’t cave. Completely lame.
I can’t wait for more solutions!
My son is strong willed so I am also of the cave-right-away if it’s not something I’m willing to go the bitter end with.
This week hand washing is the bitter end (very bitter).
We have a star reward system that’s worked pretty well for other things. But sheesh, ask him to wash his hands and it’s like I’ve asked him to carry me on his back through a dark, toyless hell. (Sorry, very dramatic I know but this is my life right now!)
I don’t have the time or patience to face-off about this every single time so I give in. If it has to be done, I do it with a cloth. And he doesn’t get a star. And that means his 20-star goal culminating in something little that he wants from the toy shop is infinitely delayed.
(Hmmm, maybe I don’t push it because it’s subconsciously good for my hip pocket??)
Anyway, I’m hoping this action/consequence thing will eventually mean something to him consistently.
Looking forward to having other aces up my sleeve though.
My daily struggle to avoid the coercive cycle is mostly with one of my boys (the other has no inclination, for whatever reason, to fight me on stuff… so strange). And it’s with SO MANY things. As just ONE example: Getting dressed in the morning. He won’t do it himself, he won’t let me help him, he won’t do it before breakfast (which makes us inevitably late). He’s too “cozy” and refuses to get changed out of PJs. I TOTALLY failed yesterday, insisting that he had to change before coming down to breakfast, TOTALLY walking into that power struggle. I wasn’t going to let him get away with his outright defiance, no sirree, no way! I marched downstairs with his brother and started breakfast without him; meanwhile, he’s having a full-out tantrum. Ah… sweet victory. UGH. So, yeah, guess who caved first?! We HAD to get to school, I couldn’t deal with the idea that he’d have no breakfast before school, so I was cornered (and as an aside, feeling cornered by my 3-year old is definitely a big trigger for my anger, which then completely clouds my judgment and makes me a useless, inflexible parent). He came downstairs, still not dressed, we both pouted through breakfast. He got dressed immediately after he ate. So… let’s hope I don’t keep teaching him that lovely lesson: that his tantruming will bring mom up running to fix things. In the last 2 days, I’ve brought both kids down in PJs, they ate breakfast, then I insist they get dressed before they can play a bit. I changed the context and avoided that conflict altogether… in this case, it’s what works best.
Some of the things that work best for my kids (differently for each one, actually):
- “Playful” parenting, like many have already brought up: making stuff they don’t want to do into a game.
- Choices (but only 2, no more, or they get overwhelmed)
- Explaining my reasons ONLY ONCE (otherwise we get into a loop of “but why?” “But I waaaaaaaaant to!”
- Mirroring their emotions, at a less intense level, but with empathic intent
- Fantasizing with them about what they can’t have (for example, “I too wish that we could stay in pyjamas all day, every day…”)
- Bribing (the ol’ standby: “if you eat your dinner, you can have dessert”)
- Counting to 3 (I have NO IDEA why this works so damn often, but it does)
- with one of mine, letting him “cry it out”: sometimes there’s no way to avoid the meltdown and my rush/anxiety to try to avoid it makes everything worst. Often after he’s had 2 min of a good, hard cry, he’s ready to listen and think more clearly.
T asked what I was going to ask – what do we do about it?! I’m looking forward to the next few posts then.
I do have another question then and how this relates to sleeping. If this cycle teaches them that if they cry & whine long enough they will get their way, when is it “okay” to switch from always responding to their needs vs. saying “enough” since we don’t want to teach them these habits?
@Isabela- it is good to know that an expert struggles with this, too! And how interesting that it is just one of your two boys that does it.
We used to have huge struggles around getting dressed, too. For us, it was the need to put on sunscreen- we live in San Diego and are fair skinned. Our daughter needs sunscreen every day in the summer and she used to fight it like you wouldn’t believe. We eventually started putting the TV on and distracting her with one of her favorite shows while we got her dressed, did her hair, and put the sunscreen on. She doesn’t get to watch that much TV, so she will usually take any opportunity we give her. We still do this. In fact, this morning, I brushed her teeth in front of the TV.
@Flo- we’ve had the big struggles around hand washing, too. They come and go, so one day she’ll wash hands no problem, and the next day it is a major problem. I have no idea why. We, too, will resort to using a cloth to get it done if necessary. I’ve had some luck with the counting to 3 trick and also with throwing a fake tantrum of my own: “waaaah! Pumpkin won’t wash her hands! Waaaah!” She’ll sometimes get a big grin out of that, come over and give me a hug and tell me it is OK, and then wash her hands.
@Cloud: Unfortunately, my children refuse to acknowledge my credentials as an “expert.”
@Beth: about the sleep-related question, it’s indeed the same principle, but the trouble is that bedtime is also so fraught with children’s insecurities, fears, and real lack of skills for getting themselves to sleep. So… sometimes ignoring their pleas for attention/help/comfort doesn’t serve our end goal of teaching them to sleep on their own (if that is indeed our goal). When you think your child is ready to learn these skills, then the key is to put a sleep-training plan (whatever seems right for your family) into effect that you can follow-through with CONSISTENTLY over several days/nights. There’s no absolute “right” time to do this, although our book and the first 6 months of this blog focuses on the ages and stages that are most optimal for making this switch you’re talking about.
@Cloud – I am really looking forward to throwing my first tantrum over handwashing!
@Beth – sleep is an enormous issue for us too. It always has been and it seems to be getting worse (going to bed that is – he’s finally sleeping through most nights at the age of three and a bit).
Off I go to the first six months of the blog and the book…
The problem about food is not necessarily that he is a picky eater…he’ll eat most anything, including tamales or anything with rice or even broccoli (something I hated as a kid). It is more getting him to eat ANYTHING. I say, “Dinner” and he says in the same intonation, “GOLFING”. I do feed him while he’s playing etc., but getting him to actually sit down and eat is a big deal for anything other than breakfast. He’d really rather be doing something else. He’s been this way since birth. He’s like -3% on the weight chart but I don’t really know how that can happen, since you can’t have 103% of people of his age be heavier than him
We let him sit at the table and color etc and we have family dinners, but the transition to the table is tough, as other people have mentioned. Last night we got into an epic battle about eating his meatballs and spaghetti, which we ended because i distracted him with a bath and after that he ate a whole plate.
For a while, we were doing well Tiger Woods eats his …., but we’ve ended this for anyone but fictional characters
As for people saying that I can ward off tantrums, oh I do…right after nap is the worst, but I do offer him a snack, but you can’t make them eat it either if they don’t take it.
Ah, parenthood…
@Cloud, I just read your post, which is great. I guess my problem is that we have a cycle. I’m okay with doing what you said, actually I really like it, Parent’s job is deciding what to serve and when and it is the child’s job to decide whether and how much to eat, but what about the following cycle:
-I serve lunch, snack, dinner (insert meal or snack)
-He doesn’t eat or refuses to go to table
-later has food related melt down because he hasn’t eaten, which is the part I’d like to avoid?
@ Shelby – I’m not sure if this is exactly your issue, but I noticed over the break that if DD (almost 3) was playing and I said “do you want X for a snack/lunch?”, she would say “No” or “I’m not hungry”. But I could see that she was on the edge of a hunger-induced tantrum or frustration session and NEEDED to eat.
So the better strategy for her was to put the food in front of her, and once she saw it she would eat. In general, I serve her “favorites” for lunch and snacks and save the new or potentially nose-turning foods for family meals and dinners. While she’s playing she might say that she doesn’t want mac’n’cheese for lunch, but once she can “see” the mac’n’cheese, she’s all over it!
I’m also willing to offer snacks in the living room with the toys. I’m pretty consistent about having meals at the table, but I’m more lenient with snack locations in order to make sure that the hunger is kept at bay.
Hope that helps!
@Shelby- if you’re still reading… Yeah, our daughter does that a bit, too. I think eating just isn’t as much fun as what ever she is playing with. Our approach for meals has been to put the food on the table, have everyone else sit down to eat and start having a conversation that might be of interest to her, and then wait. That usually works, but we do sometimes have to do some cajoling/distracting and picking her up and putting her in her chair.
For snacks, if she doesn’t want one, I try again in about 15 minutes.
The big exception to this is breakfast- since it has been so long since she’s eaten, she’s particularly prone to low blood sugar meltdowns before breakfast. So, if I can’t get her in her chair pretty quickly, I’ll bring a graham cracker to wherever she is.
In fact, anytime I think the stubbornness is being abetted by low blood sugar, I bring her a graham cracker.
What about kids who are find at home but are behavior problems at school? Can you cover that?
@jodifur: I’d figure out what kind of problem the child is having at school and go from there. Causes for “behaviour problems” can be so diverse, for a few examples: undiagnosed learning difficulties/delays, being bullied (most kids who are bullied act out against other children themselves… go figure), a bad teacher-student match, anxiety about learning, being overtired, etc. Depending on the source of the problem, I’d tackle the issues at school differently. It’s great to enlist the help of someone at the school who can work WITH you (not against you) to understand what your child’s going through… and work on a joint plan of action together. Getting the same sort so rules and consequences at home and school can sometimes help kids “get” how their behaviour needs to generalize to all contexts. I’ll be dealing with different sorts of issues that COULD come up at school, although they could also come up at camp, sports activities, etc.