Lyndsey Tips and tricks on how to maintain control in the most meaningful ways when your school aged, younger children are becoming defiant. Advice on how to stop your frustration and theirs.
Does it feel like your child’s main mission is to do the exact opposite of what you say? Hey parents, I hear you, I see you, and I feel your pain. The power struggles that can come from our children can knock us on our butts! Sometimes you can see it progressing, and sometimes it comes out of nowhere and you get completely blindsided. Either way, defiance coming from your little one is not a fun situation, and it can be hard to handle!
We spend so much time teaching our children to be independent and willful, but what happens when that turns around on you? How do you handle those situations in a tactful way, without crushing the independence you have worked so hard to create? What can you do to make sure that the defiance doesn’t create unsafe situations for your child?
As our littles ones grow up, they will start to set their own paths, and explore their independence. Our job is to give them the space to explore their independence, but to assure they do this in a safe and healthy way. Your little one will grow out of their toddler years, start going to school, start making new friends, and they will start understanding the world in a different way. They will meet kids who have different opinions, rules, or views of the world. All of these items will have an impact on your child, and you might start to see changes in their behavior, thoughts, likes, and dislikes.
These aren’t the only reasons that defiance forms in younger children though, so the first key to determining how to maintain control of the situation is to establish the reasoning behind the behavior.
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Overview
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Main Reasons for Defiance in Younger Kids
However frustrating it may be to have your children fighting your every word, there is usually a reason behind it. Determining this reason is the first and most important part in figuring out what direction to take when handling defiance.
- Attention seeking behaviors
- Exploring their autonomy
- Boredom
- Feeling constricted or lack of choices
- They are overwhelmed
- Testing your limits
These are all very common reasons for children to act out and be defiant. The hard part can be determining which of these reasons apply for your child. This may take a little digging, and looking into yourself and your household dynamics as well.
Taking a Step Back
My first suggestion, take a step back and look at yourself, your household, and your child’s view. Put yourself in their shoes! Out of the list above, what do you think would apply to your child? Out of these items, what resonates with you as a possibility or likelihood? These will be the first items you will want to consider and look into.
Attention Seeking Behaviors
Did your child experience a drop in attention from you or your significant other? Has there been a change in your environment, dynamic, or have you all just been really busy?
Exploring Their Autonomy
Are they becoming more independent? Have they been trying new things, learning new things, and exploring their options available to them? Does it seem that most of the power struggles related directly to what they want versus what your expectations are?
Boredom
Is it possible they just don’t have enough to do or enough to keep them entertained? Some kids may have heaps and loads of toys lying around, how could they possibly be bored? Sometimes younger kids haven’t developed their imagination enough to create games and scenarios on their own and play independently.
Feeling Constricted or Lack of Choices
Do you provide choices that your child can make? What if someone dictated what you did all day every day, from the moment you woke up until you went to bed? Would you feel like lashing out or breaking the rules? Does your child get to make choices about their day, their activities, or their life?
They Are Overwhelmed
Is it possible that your child has too much going on? Is your schedule very busy, or their schedule very busy? Do they have time to relax and unwind? Children need to be able to do this too! Do they have a regular routine and expectations?
Testing Your Limits
Have you provided clear expectations for your child and stuck to them? Do you sometimes provide wishy washy responses or give in too easily? Is it possible that you are not strict enough, or have changed your answers? Have you threatened a discipline multiple times, but not followed through?
Talk to Your Child
After you have taken a step back and looked at yourself, your household dynamics, and your child’s point of view, it’s time to involve your child! Once you have established some baselines of what could be the causes of their defiance, have a real talk with them. The nice part about young children is that they are old enough to comprehend a rational conversation, and respond if questions are asked in an appropriate way.
Tips for Engaging Your Child
- Determine a list of questions that can help pinpoint how they are feeling. Make sure these questions are more along the lines of “yes/no” questions, or easy to decipher for your child. You will know what would be appropriate based on your child’s development and understanding. Questions that are too open ended can overwhelm a child, and they may not recognize their feelings well enough to provide an answer outside of “I don’t know”. Examples:
- Do you understand why we make choices for you?
- Do you understand that what you are doing is wrong?
- Does it feel like sometimes you are too busy?
- Do you get enough time to yourself?
- What are some things you would like to do to make your day more fun?
- Do you feel like you get to make enough choices?
- Are you having a hard time finding something to do?
- Are you angry or upset with me/us?
- What kinds of choices would you like to make?
- Do you feel like we spend enough time together?
- Do you feel like we don’t listen to you?
- When I say “…..”, do you think I mean it?
…
- Make sure to meet your child for the conversation, don’t make them come to you. Have the conversation somewhere they will feel comfortable. Make sure they understand it is a safe space to give honest answers, and they won’t be in trouble for saying how they feel.
- Before getting into the nitty gritty details of a conversation, make sure your child knows it’s a safe space to give honest answers. Make sure they understand that you won’t be mad or upset with them, and they can openly answer your questions.
- Do not turn the conversation into a power struggle. Don’t argue with them about their responses or try to prove a point, this time you need to just listen. Even if their responses don’t seem reasonable or valid, it’s their feelings and how they feel is valid. Allow them to speak their mind, be honest and open, and don’t degrade or belittle their feelings, otherwise it’s likely they will shut down.
- Ask further questions based off of their answers.
- Work towards realistic solutions together, involving them as much as possible (especially if one of the reasonings seems to be a lack of choices).
Creating Solutions that Work!
Once you have determined the cause of the defiant behavior, it’s time to create and set real solutions that will work! Make sure these solutions are manageable, realistic, and work for you and your family. Every situation and scenario is different, and every child is different. It’s hard to provide a set path that will work for everyone because we don’t all fit into the same box!
With that said, I wanted to at least provide some examples of solutions to help inspire you and get you thinking of what could work for you! If you have any other suggestions, ideas, or solutions that have worked, please feel free to share them with this community in the comments below.
Attention Seeking Behaviors
- Determine at what times they feel they aren’t getting enough attention from you or your significant other.
- Work through different ideas and solutions together for allowing your child to feel that they are being included, important, or have your attention. If some of their ideas are not possible, explain why or redirect them into a more beneficial and realistic direction.
- Make it a point to provide better active listening to your child. I know we all get busy, and parenting can be overwhelming. Just do your best to be intentional about actively listening to and engaging with your child.
- If your are able to, try to set up a “date” with your child. If you have other children, keep them home with your significant other, or find a sitter so you can both go, and take your child on a date. Come up with ideas, with your child, of what kind of activities they would like to do, allowing time with just you and your child.
- Think of ways to make sure your child feels heard and seen. This can differ for every family dynamic.
- Avoid reactions to the negative behavior, and give big reactions for positive behaviors. If they are seeking attention, and feel they are only getting it from their negative behavior, they will continue the negative behaviors. Try to ignore the negative behaviors (if it doesn’t pose danger/risk), and provide attention and positive reactions for their positive behaviors.
For more ideas, check out the posts below for further information and ideas on spending quality time together:
20 Inexpensive Ideas for Quality Family Time Activities
Quality Family Time: What’s so great about it and how do we do it?
Also, you can find a lot of books on children defiance and quality time, take a look at this Play Therapy Activities Book. This has great resources on improving bonding between you and your child.
Exploring Their Autonomy
- When children are exploring their autonomy, they are discovering their independence. This isn’t a bad thing, but it can be frustrating! Independent children have so much potential to grow up to be highly engaged, motivated, successful and independent adults. Keep that in mind when determining resolutions, as you don’t want to crush their independence.
- Explain to your child why you make decisions for them, and why it’s important for them to listen and understand your rules.
- Try to understand their expressions and opinions, determine if maybe you need to explain your rules more clearly, or the reasoning behind them.
- Avoid using phrases such as “because I told you so”. They are old enough now to have their own thoughts and opinions on things, so they are old enough to provide reasoning behind your choices, rules and boundaries.
- Pick your battles. If your child feels like they don’t have any autonomy, they will start to defy everything because they feel that everything is too controlled. Don’t fight about every small item, choose to focus on the larger issues and let some of the others slide.
Boredom
- Help your child to create activities or games. If you are able to, try and play with them to keep the engaged and entertained. It doesn’t have to be all day, every day, but even 20 minutes can help.
- Make mundane activities more enjoyable by throwing in a quick and easy challenge with it. My son loves to play “red car/blue car” while we are driving and he’s bored. It’s a competition between him and either myself or my significant other on who can find more cars of their color. Play a quick game of Simon says, the floor is lava, or red light green light.
- Rotate their toys! If your child has too many toys lying around, they will forget what they have, or get bored of it just from looking at it too much. I know it sounds silly, but hide away toys in a tote somewhere and leave only 1/4 or a partial amount out to play with. when they start getting bored of those toys, rotate them out for new ones.
- Help them to create games out of small things they are doing, or make up a scenario for them to play out with their toys or by acting.
For ideas on different activities to do with your child, take a look at my posts below:
20 Inexpensive Ideas for Quality Family Time Activities
Feeling Constricted or Lack of Choices
- Talk with your child and work through different options of choices they are able to make. Consider different options and allow your child to give input as well. Give them ideas, that may spark their own ideas to contribute as well!
- Give them a day each week where they can choose the family dinner
- Allow them to pick some activities they would like to do, and actually follow through on doing them.
- Give them a day to decide what you all will be doing that day.
- Allow them some contributions to the grocery list.
- Find out what kinds of decisions they want to make, and within reason, allow them their choices. If you are not able to allow their decision, explain why so they understand.
They Are Overwhelmed
- Ask questions to determine what is overwhelming them. Give them ideas that you may think are appropriate to help engage them in the conversations.
- Make sure you have consistent schedules and expectations so they have a clear understanding of what is to come each day.
- Outline your plans for the day with them, and avoid surprises. Keep them engaged and understanding what comes next.
- Create routines and stick to them! As much as children are so free spirited, they truly do need routines and regulation to thrive and feel confident and safe.
- Take a look at your days and your household dynamic. Is your family too busy? Is it possible to cut out some items? Remember, it’s okay to say no (even to your family and friends). You don’t have to agree to every opportunity, party and outing that you are invited to. This can be very hard on your children, and hard to keep routines.
- Suggest or plan calming activities for your child, and allow them “me time”. So many parents need “me time”, but have you considered that your child might need this too?
If you would like suggestions or ideas for calming activities for your child, check out this post on 101 fantastic calming activity ideas coming from Simply Well Balanced.
Testing Your Limits
- Avoid power struggles with your child, don’t feed into them testing your limits. If possible (and not a danger to do so) try to ignore the bad behavior at the time, and find a way to discuss it at a later time.
- Avoid drastic reactions right away. Children test your limits to receive a reaction and see how far they can push. Reacting will only increase this desire.
- Set clear and concise rules and boundaries and explain their reasoning. Once these rules and boundaries are set, do not stray from them. Be consistent with your rules. If you give an inch, they will take a mile.4
- Be consistent with your discipline. Don’t threaten a discipline and not follow through with it, this will just make the child think they can get away with it. Don’t threaten disciplines that are not realistic, as you won’t be able to follow through and it will create even worse behavior.
- Provide the anticipated discipline after explaining the rules and boundaries. For example: You can play soccer but do not kick the ball at the house or cars. If you kick the ball at the house or cars, we will take your soccer ball away and you won’t get it back for three days. This provides a clear outline of the expectations, and what will happen if they do not abide by the expectations.
My Story
Quick Background
My son is currently almost 6 years old. He has been such a good listener, and a well behaved child up until he started attending Kindergarten. He was attending a daycare previously, but once he was introduced to Kindergarten all of the sudden his attitude, behavior, and listening took a complete 180° turn.
This change has been very frustrating for him and for us. He went from barely ever getting disciplined, to being disciplined all the time. At first, my husband and I got so frustrated, we were constantly in power struggles and arguments with him EVERY DAY. It felt so defeating! I had spent many days and nights crying, trying to understand what happened to my sweet little boy!
Steps We Took
We have overcome a lot of the behaviors by having discussions about why the behavior is wrong, and understanding what his logic was behind the behavior. We provided reasons and examples of why the behaviors were wrong, and helped him to understand that even if he is witnessing this from other children, it doesn’t make it right.
We have started picking our battles, and being consistent with what is okay, and what is not.
Recently though, he has been flat our defying everything we say. He does the exact opposite, and it almost seems FUNNY to him! Which just makes me want to pull my hair out!
What’s Next???
I started thinking about the reasonings behind defiance in children his age. What could be causing this. Once I sat down and looked at everything, he has NO CHOICES. We don’t provide him ANY choices. Granted, he gets to pick the sports he participates in, and the clothes he wears for the day. On the other hand, he doesn’t get to choose the food he eats, the snacks we have, the activities we do, the places we go, the toys he has, or even when he gets to poop (this is a whole other story with the pooping, but it has to be regulated due to accidents).
I thought, how would I feel if I couldn’t make any decisions for myself? It would feel very cruddy, and belittling. I don’t want him to feel that way, so I wanted to talk to him to see if his words align with my thinking.
Our Discussion
Questions I asked him:
Are you frustrated or angry with your dad or I? – no
Are you upset with me or your dad? – no
Do you feel like we don’t pay enough attention to you? – no
Do you think we do enough fun things? – yes
Do you feel like you get a lot of choices to make for yourself? – no
Do you think you would like to make more choices for yourself – yes
Continuing Our Discussion
These questions confirmed my thinking, that we don’t provide him enough choices. So we started discussing options of choices that he could make. We decided on him choosing some snacks to add to the grocery list, choosing a dinner for the family once a week, and being able to decide what we do as activities some days. We can add more choices after we work through these first ones.
Additionally, I also explained: “when dad or I tell you that your choice or decision will not work, it’s not to be mean and we do it for a reason. It is our responsibility to make sure that you make safe and healthy decisions. I want to support your decisions, but if they aren’t safe or healthy, we will have to tell you no”.
Conclusion
Having and independent child is not a bad thing. Independent children have the potential to grow into motivated, successful and independent adults. You don’t want to crush your child’s independence, you want to lay guidelines for making healthy and safe choices. It’s important to determine the causes behind your child’s defiance, and tailor your actions and resolution based on your findings. You want to construct boundaries and rules that are understandable, clear, and have a concise and reasonable consequences for when the rules aren’t followed. The biggest ticket here is consistency. Children need consistency and routine, so provide their routine and rules, be consistent, follow through, and watch them thrive!
I hope you have found this content useful, and have curated some ideas and thoughts for how to move forward with your child. If you have any questions or feedback, please provide them in the comments and I will respond as quickly as possible.
I love to see everyone thrive, so please share your stories and ideas! Please pin this to help get this information available to everyone.
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Thank you so much for stopping by!
You’ve shared some good, practical ideas here. I also like to pray with my little great-grands and help them see how God wants all of us to obey His commands and principles.
That’s a great idea! I love that.
[…] Defeating Defiance in Younger Kids | How To Maintain Control in the Best Ways […]
It was great to see you link up a post this week for Wednesdays Words and Pics on Denyse Whelan Blogs to Connect. Thank you so much and I hope to see you next week too. Just one post, please. Denyse.
Hi Denyse, thank you for hosting! So sorry for the extra posts added, I will be sure to keep it to one.