The Active/Aggressive Child: Parenting Strategies

Parenting Patterns to Avoid with the Active/Aggressive Child
Lack of nurturing can lead to aggressive behavior in any child - whether or not he is sensation-seeking. The active, sensation-seeking child simply has a greater likelihood of such a pattern. Other children who are deprived of love are more likely to show their trauma in other ways, such as apathy and withdrawal or self-destructive behavior. Some parenting patterns inadvertently support aggressive behavior in more subtle ways. Certain parents who are warm and caring may have a lot of difficulty setting appropriate limits. They may also be confused by their child's active, sensation-seeking manner, and find it difficult to teach their child how to communicate his intentions and feelings.

We have found that youngsters who have good control over their aggression, whether it is at school, at the daycare center, or at home, tend to have lots of little interactions with adults in which they receive nonverbal messages about limits. Normally, when a child is becoming mischievous or aggressive, there is plenty of warning - a twinkle in his eyes, a devilish look, a grimace, a scowl, a clenching of the fist, a stamping of the foot. A parent looks back with a warning look in his or her eyes or may even say, "No, you can't do that." The child backs off or, at least, gives the parent some indication of what is to come. But, in some families, there are no such warnings. When the child and parents begin to get frustrated and angry, neither the child nor the parents show it at first. They are expressionless, poker-faced, their bodies stiff. For example, a child is playing nicely, talking, and pushing his car around the kitchen floor when, suddenly, he pinches his mother in the leg. Parent and child suddenly explode, screaming and hitting. There have been no nonverbal "cues" and warnings exchanged between parent and child. Instead, they both leap right to physical actions. Even a child who isn't generally overly active and sensation-seeking can have problems with aggression when nonverbal interaction is lacking.

Another common mistake that many parents make with a child who is active, assertive, and quick to anger is to vacillate between being "nice guys" and then exploding in rage, before swinging back to being "nice guys" again. Parents, of course, like to be nice guys. They don't like to get angry. So they may say in a calm tone, "Oh, come on, Maurice, please don't touch that plug! I don't think you're listening to me, Maurice. Please listen to me. . . ." Meanwhile, the child just smiles and continues reaching for the plug. Reluctant to get angry, the parent may continue pleading with the child in the same tone of voice until, utterly frustrated, she blows up, frightening the child, who wasn't prepared for his parent's explosive anger. Then the parent feels guilty for the out-of-control rage and tries to make it up to the child by overindulging him. The child experiences an unpredictable, chaotic environment - first nice-nice, then out of control, and then nice-nice again.

A child who can't understand nonverbal communication because of a lack of practice with his parents (or because of difficulties with processing what he hears or sees) gets confused and misreads situations. When the teacher looks serious, the child may think the teacher is fooling around and react by keeping up his provocative behavior. Or, conversely, when the teacher looks a little annoyed, he may be frightened that the teacher is furious and may seek to defend himself by lashing out. Wrestling with a friend, he might not understand when the friend tells him he wants to stop and keeps wrestling. Or when another child approaches to offer him some candy, he may throw a punch because he mistakenly thinks she is trying to take something from him.

The trouble can mount as the child reaches the stage when he is supposed to begin learning emotional ideas. Having been discouraged from developing a vocabulary of gestures to communicate emotional needs, he will have even greater difficulty expressing needs with words and symbols. Teachers and parents of an active/aggressive child are often so busy setting limits that they forget to give the child extra practice in using ideas instead of actions.

Parents who don't encourage pretend play (which fosters the development of emotional ideas), or who don't support emotional ideas when it comes to coping with aggression, only compound the challenges. The child doesn't progress beyond the physical and behavioral manifestations of aggression and learn to elevate his feelings to the level of ideas, in the form of make-believe play and narrative. The child doesn't learn how to construct an internal dialogue that connects his emotions and his language. He never acquires the ability to picture his feelings and is thereby unable to fully contemplate his actions in advance.

Some parents, because of their own upbringing, may equate thought and action. "If I think it, I will do it." They, therefore, believe that it's best not to have any aggression emerge in either pretend play or verbal description. When the good soldier starts shooting the bad guy, the parent may respond with "Don't do that," or try to change the scene to one of nurturing: "Hey, let's make those soldiers become good friends and like each other!" While our desire to have our children think only nice and loving thoughts is understandable, we need to be more aware that all of us, by the very fact that we are human, experience the full range of feelings - assertiveness and anger as well as love and warmth.

We, as parents, have a choice. We can continue to let the child express anger at the level of behavior. But then the child can only either act out the anger or anxiously try to inhibit it. Alternatively, we can help our child to elevate anger and other feelings to the world of ideas and let him bring the feeling into pretend play (with soldiers fighting, for example) and into his words ("Mommy, I'm mad!"). Eventually the ideas will be accessible to his reasoning ("Boy, am I mad. I'm gonna talk to Mom about why I'm mad"). When a child learns to picture and verbalize his feelings, he has the opportunity to reason and make intelligent choices. If we don't help our children learn to raise their feelings to this level because we are worried that saying "it" will mean doing "it," we actually increase the likelihood that our child will act out rather than talk out his feelings. Helping a youngster through this transition can be exceptionally challenging for parents who were brought up to believe that thinking and doing are the same. It means changing their own way of coping with feelings at the same time they are trying to help their son or daughter.

In addition to helping children use ideas, parents sometimes have difficulty fostering self-observation. Encouraging a reflective attitude toward emotions is also difficult for parents who are either too strict (they have lots of rigid rules) or parents who are too permissive (they simply give in on every front). When parents believe in a very concrete, law-and-order approach, and the notion of pausing, reasoning, or putting feelings into ideas has no meaning for them, they go head to head with a child who is already very intense. The resulting power struggles and conflict may only make the child more aggressive.

It's not unusual to have a punitive father and a permissive mother in the same family. But parents who are too strict and parents who are too permissive have something in common: neither one is fostering a truly reflective attitude. Neither one is helping the child observe his own behavior and try to understand it. For example, when the child insists on going outside when it's raining and icy, the strict parent may simply say, "Not now - and you'd better stop squawking." The permissive parent may simply say, "Well . . . yes, but put on your raincoat." The parent who is fostering a reflective attitude toward emotions will say something different. "What is your hurry? Why do you want to go out in the rain? Do you remember how slippery it was? And what are you going to do out there anyhow?" In the dialogue that ensues, the child is thinking about and discussing his wish rather than immediately giving in to it or inhibiting it. This reflective attitude becomes part of an ability that many adults cherish in themselves: the ability for self-observation - the ability to ponder what you are feeling and what you want to do and then analyze the consequences in advance.

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