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The Defiant Child

Stubborn, negative, controlling - the defiant child somehow manages to turn even the simplest activity into a trial. His first reaction to virtually anything is negative: "I don't want to!" "I don't care!" "No!" "Do I have to?" He deals with his world in a very bossy way. In the 1940s, Rene Spitz, a pioneering observer of young children, suggested that a child's first "no" is an attempt to define himself - a way of establishing a boundary between himself and the rest of the world. Most children eventually move on to a more collaborative way of relating. But the defiant child seems to get stuck in the "no" stage. He seeks to define himself through what he won't do rather than what he will do.

"My child's first word was 'no,' " one exasperated mother of a defiant seven-year-old told me, "and that's all he's been saying ever since."

Parents most frequently notice this defiance and negativism around transitions. This child has enormous difficulty going from Point A to Point B. Getting out of bed in the morning, going to school, sitting down at the dinner table - all can become long, drawn-out battles. Even activities that the child likes - going to the swimming pool or to a birthday party, going out for ice cream, visiting a friend's house - can bring on the same dig-in-the-heels stubbornness. "Why do I have to?" the child may ask over and over again, even if he really wants to go. "I don't want to."

Alongside stubbornness and negativism, the defiant child has enormous energy and persistence. Many defiant children are also unusually clever, figuring out ways to defeat your most sophisticated arguments. They can also be extraordinarily well organized and methodical, as well as deliberate and purposeful. As such a child gets older, he may also be a "big-picture" person, able to see the forest and not just the trees, and to delve into realms of abstract thinking that can surprise parents, friends, and educators alike. The key challenge for parents and teachers is helping the defiant youngster use these various assets in a constructive way so that, as he gets older, he can use his talents for such pursuits as science, mathematics, philosophy, law, or any other field where persistence and organization are assets.

The Defiant Baby and Toddler
A defiant child's behavior can appear as early as the first year, often as soon as the child begins to learn intentional communication. He may whine, pout, and cry much of the time and reject any attempts by his parents to comfort him. Offered toys, food, or cuddling, he may squirm away or shake his head. "Nothing I do pleases him," parents of a defiant child often complain. As a toddler, this child takes the natural negativism that goes with this age to new heights. He will often seem to deliberately choose the activity that is opposite of what the parents want. For example, a mother tells eighteen-month-old Brittany, "It's dinnertime," and reaches down to pick her up. But, even though she is hungry, the toddler scrambles out of mother's reach. "No!" she shouts, grabbing her toy. "Look," says mother, holding out a carrot stick. "Mmm, your favorite!" But Brittany shakes her head. "No!" she says again.

Of course, every toddler is going to say his share of "No!" But most toddlers are often pleasant, joyful, and cooperative, while the defiant child seems to be mostly negative:

PARENT: Do you want to go outside?
CHILD: No!
PARENT: What if we played with your trucks?
CHILD: Don't want to!
PARENT: I know! Let's watch your Barney video.
CHILD: No! No stupid Barney!

Keep in mind that the negative patterns I am describing can appear at any age. Your child may not necessarily start out with these patterns. You may find that your child is cooperative in the first or second or even third year, but then begins to display these negative characteristics in later years.

This negative attitude can extend into all areas of life. The child may be a very picky eater, for example, refusing anything but peanut butter sandwiches and macaroni.

The Defiant Preschool Child
Between the ages of two and four, when children begin using words and pretend play with emotional ideas and emotional thinking, the defiant child's play seems rigid and inflexible instead of rich and creative. Instead of a drama in which a mommy bear takes care of her baby bear during a fierce storm, for example, this child may just line up his teddy bears and move them one by one into a dollhouse. If a parent tries to join in ("Michael, what if some of the teddy bears stayed outside to play. Here, I'll help-"), he may protest furiously, screaming, "No! No! Leave 'em alone. They're mine!"

He may play with only a few toys or games over and over again. He may prefer things to people because he can control objects and bring order to them. He may not want other children in his room or his house for fear they will take his toys or mess up his room. He may not like going to other children's houses because they don't have his favorite toys.

The defiant child will probably be very controlling - insisting that he is right all the time and wanting his own way about everything - bedtime, the clothes he wears, the food he eats, even the people he meets. To the embarrassment of his parents, for example, he may refuse to talk to certain people. "Say hello to Grandma," a parent may say. "No!" replies this child, running from the room.

That bossy, controlling outlook also extends to friendships. He may try to insist that other children always play the games he chooses and then gets upset if they won't. Or he may change the rules of games so that he always wins. "No," he may insist during a game of Chutes and Ladders. "The rules say I can climb up the chutes, but you can't. I know it!" Some defiant children are very shy. Others are very verbal - arguing for their point of view all the time.

The Defiant School-Age Child
In the early grade-school years, during "the world is my oyster" phase, with its expansive fantasies of heroes and heroines, a defiant child's rigidity may hold him back. Instead of pretending to be an astronaut or a powerful GI Joe, for example, the defiant child's fantasies might be more structured and guarded. He often plays out scenes of control, games in which he is guarding a "castle" from attack, with all kinds of secret weapons. For example, one six-year-old boy I worked with built an imaginary fort in my office. As he explained it to me, his fort came equipped with metal shields to protect it from rocket attacks.

This is the age when children are full of wonder - asking lots of big questions about how the world works. But the defiant child seems more concrete, focused on mastering a small piece of his world rather than embracing the sheer wonder of it all. He might ask the same question over and over. In school, he may be a good student - bright and hardworking - a good reader and good with numbers. In fact, he may be a real perfectionist.

Because he has such a need to feel organized and in control, he prefers to focus with intensity on one task. On the playing field, for example, he may decide that the only position he can play in soccer is goalie, and then refuse even to try any other position. In school, he may like to focus on one subject exclusively and dislike skipping from subject to subject. Difficulties arise, for example, with transitions from subject to subject during a typical school day. Later in life, perhaps, he may demonstrate this preference by choosing his concentration in college (chemistry, for example) right away, rather than experimenting with different classes. (He may even date only one type of person.)

In the "playground politics" phase of development, when children normally are exploring the complexities of their peer group, defiant kids often have only a couple of friends whom they seek to control. A little boy may befriend only children who are passive and who will do everything he wants them to do. If he can't find such children, he will complain - loudly - that "the other kids won't do what I want to do." He may come home complaining, for example, that "Maurice wouldn't play with me."

"Not at all?" the father may ask.

"Well, he wanted me to kick the soccer ball with him. But I don't want to play soccer. I wanted him to play baseball and he wouldn't."

He may isolate himself from the group with more solitary pursuits - Nintendo, for example, or a hobby such as stamp or coin collecting.

In the phase of "the world inside me," when children begin to work out internal identities for themselves, the defiant child defines himself and the world in a perfectionistic way. He may have very high expectations for himself - all A's in school, for example. If he gets even one B, he will feel badly about himself and attack himself ("I'm so stupid. I'm the stupidest person in the world!"). And he could have a very moralistic stance toward other children, becoming very critical of them if he feels that they are "selfish," for example.

A defiant child is generally not flexible in his emotions. He tends not to move from the "all-or-nothing" thinking that pervades earlier ages to viewing the world in relative terms, understanding that life often operates in shades of gray. He may find it difficult, for example, to compete with someone and still be his friend, to be rivals on the baseball diamond, but then invite the friend over to his house for ice cream afterward.

Because of his strong visual-spatial abilities, the defiant child, as I have said, is usually more of a "big picture" sort of person, less oriented to the details of life. While he seems to obsess about certain details, such as how to get the checker pieces into a certain pattern on the checkerboard, or how to get his stamps lined up in a certain way, his focus on these details is in a narrow range. He does not pick up on the details of other people's emotions, or how they are dressed or what they are talking about. If he is sensitive and worried about being criticized, he may become acutely aware of any sign of disrespect that he senses toward himself. But here, too, he is not sensitive to the wide range of nuances that go on in our interactions between people. He sees patterns in the areas that interest him, so he may grasp concepts in math or in a science project, but not patterns in terms of relationships among people. He applies his good abstract thinking skills to areas that he is interested in. The challenge is to broaden these areas of interest and to help him see the subtle nuances, particularly the emotional ones, which characterize day-to-day life.

How It Feels to Be a Defiant Child
Physically, the defiant child resembles the overly sensitive child in many ways. His protection from the world feels thin: sights, sounds, smells, and touches that are pleasant to other people may be downright irritating or overwhelming to this child. He feels invaded by the world. But instead of reacting by becoming fussy and finicky, like the highly sensitive child, the defiant child copes by trying to control his world as tightly as possible. Unlike the highly sensitive child, the defiant child has some physical characteristics that make a more aggressive approach possible. First, he tends to have relatively better visual-spatial abilities. That is, he can organize into patterns what he observes better than many other children. He uses this strong ability to help keep himself from getting overwhelmed by what he is experiencing.

In terms of auditory verbal processing abilities, he may have relatively more difficulty with detecting and processing everything that is going on around him than a highly sensitive child. Therefore, in terms of what he hears, he may not pick up on subtle emotion or double meanings in the way that the highly sensitive child can. While some defiant children have excellent vocabularies and excellent command of language, in general, they find it easier to create their own "language" and use their own ideas than to pick up all the messages coming from others.

Like the overly sensitive child, the defiant child may have some motor-planning difficulties (such as putting on socks or copying a series of complex shapes). However, the defiant child also tends to have a little better postural control than the overly sensitive child. He probably has enough motor-planning capacities to use them to remain organized and to avoid situations or challenges that could overwhelm him. In contrast, the highly sensitive child is more apt to let himself get overloaded and frazzled. For example, a defiant child might draw very neat stick people in one corner of his paper - methodically crafting each line - when asked by a teacher to draw a picture of the story she had told. A highly sensitive child might scribble circles, squares, and lines on the whole page, using lots of colors, but constructing what could be described as a "mishmash." The meaning of the defiant child's stick figures might be quite clear, while the sensitive child might be the only one able to decipher his creations, explaining that the red blotch was the sun, the green line was the tree leaning toward the sun, and so on.

Our defiant child may be easily overloaded, like our sensitive child, but he uses his physical characteristics to contain, organize, and avoid. In essence, the defiant child makes a trade-off: because he is so sensitive physically and so easily overwhelmed, he must tightly restrict his experiences in order to stay organized and in control. He is careful not to bite off more than he can chew. He uses his relatively strong visual-spatial abilities to organize those experiences that he does venture into. His "bossiness," controlling behavior, and resistance to new situations, experiences, and people all come about because he has to work so hard to stay organized and in control. No wonder he says "No" a lot! He copes with his tendency to be overwhelmed by restricting sensory and emotional input and avoiding challenging new experiences.