Sarah was despondent. “I don’t know what to do” she said. “Lucas is eight, but he behaves like a toddler. The harder I try to set boundaries, the more he refuses to do what I ask. We’ve tried the Naughty Step, Time Out, sticker charts, taking away his screen time… none of it helps.” In my work as a clinical psychologist, I talk to many parents like Sarah, who are doing their very best and yet who are floundering. In trying to help improve their children’s behaviour they find themselves locked into intense battles over daily routines. They describe life as like walking on eggshells; their children exploding at the slightest request. (Photo: Lauren Pysk)

Feeling bad about themselves

Meanwhile, children like Lucas spend their lives never getting the prize at the end of the sticker chart – and feeling increasingly bad about themselves as a result. At school, their names are frequently in the Red Zone of the traffic light system. The other children resent them because their behaviour means that the whole class misses their playtime. They are often called naughty, badly behaved or defiant. They may well be sent for assessments to try and work out what is ‘wrong’. (Photo: 10'000 Hours/Getty)

What children need and what parents think

Typically, none of this improves their behaviour – in fact it may well make things worse. Some children get to the point where most of their daily interactions are negative, and yet their behaviour still doesn’t improve. Adults start to despair. By the time I meet the children themselves, they will sometimes tell me that they are naughty, and that everyone knows it. Clearly, something isn’t working here. So what’s going wrong? Put simply, there’s a mismatch between what these children need, and what their parents think they should be doing. I call this the Pressure Paradox: the more that parents put pressure on their child to behave, the worse the child feels – and so the worse their behaviour becomes. (Photo: Ian West/PA)

'Good parenting'

A lot of what we call ‘good parenting’ is really about controlling a child’s behaviour. That is what strategies like the Naughty Step or sticker charts are about: make a child do something they don’t like and they will change their behaviour to avoid that consequence; give them a reward to work for, and they will try harder. But for lots of children, including Lucas, these methods just don’t work. In fact their behaviour gets worse. That’s because the way that children – and all of us – behave is driven by our internal state. I’m going to guess that you behave quite differently when you feel relaxed than when you are tense and angry. And if what their parent is doing or threatening to do makes a child feel bad, then their behaviour can deteriorate rather than improve. Sarah described how this played out in their house. Lucas would wake up and Sarah would tell him to put his clothes on. If he refused, which he often did, Sarah would respond with a threat, telling him that if he didn’t get dressed quickly he couldn’t watch TV later. This would make Lucas anxious – and as a result more emphatic in his refusal. The more Sarah pushed, the more inflexible Lucas became. (Photo: ljubaphoto/Getty/E+)

Not just labelling them 'naughty'

They were stuck. That’s why Sarah was asking for help. But the reason that Lucas wasn’t responding to Sarah’s requests and demands wasn’t because he didn’t want to co-operate – it was because he couldn’t. And the way out of the situation involved Sarah, not Lucas, changing. In every interaction between child and parent there are two participants, one of whom is usually far more motivated to change than the other one. Almost invariably, that person is the parent. My advice to parents in this situation is, rather than seeing or labelling their child as ‘naughty’, see them as doing the best they can right now and lift some of the pressure off. I made some suggestions to Sarah about how to do this. Instead of standing over Lucas and starting the day with “Come on, put your clothes on”, I suggested she got his clothes out, said, “Clothes are here when you want them” and got on with something else. Somewhat to her surprise, when she did this, Lucas did slowly get dressed. (Photo: d3sign/Getty/Moment RF)

Moving away from threats

She tried the same with breakfast. Instead of saying “eat up or you’ll be late” she lowered the pressure with “cereal is ready”’. She stopped making threats about consequences. Instead she said “I’m ready to leave when you are” and got his school bag ready rather than trying to make him do it, resisting the urge to hurry him up. They didn’t get to school any earlier, but the battles that Sarah had come to expect didn’t happen. When I talked to Sarah after she’d started to implement this new approach she told me that it had felt very different. “I’ve stopped thinking that I must make him comply, and instead I’m thinking about how to make it easier for him to co-operate,” she said. “Now I see his behaviour as a sign that he’s feeling under pressure rather than being naughty. That means that I can reduce the pressure.” Turning things around for a child often starts with a change in mindset. Viewing behaviour as communication rather than ‘naughtiness’ allows parents to think differently about what is going on. And the good news for everyone is that they (and their children) can leave the Naughty Step behind them. (Photo: Nick David/Getty/Digital Vision)

How to reduce the pressure on your child

Instead of “Time to stop playing that game now”, say: “Are you ready to stop now, or is there a better time coming up in your game?” / Instead of “We are going swimming now”, say: “You don’t have to go swimming but your brother is going. We can sit and watch him with your tablet and I’ll bring your swimming things just in case.” / Instead of “Put that coat on now or you’ll get cold” say: “You might not need it but your coat is here. Yes, I know you’re not cold.” / Instead of: “You have to come, there’s no choice”, say: “You don’t have to join in but I can’t leave you here alone. Would you prefer to bring a book or a game to play together?” / Instead of: “You’ll be sad later when everyone else has had fun and you’ve just stayed at home” say: “You can stay at home with Daddy or you can come to the park with us. Both could be good and you can decide which you prefer.” (Adapted from When The Naughty Step Makes Things Worse by Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker) (Photo: Onfokus/Getty/E+/Onfokus.com)