There are several posts in the attachment forum that all focus on one basic issue … how does a parent regain control of a household where the child already has the upper hand? In one case, a mom writes that whenever she is shopping or at a store, her child throws a tantrum. Another mom writes about how her child will do nothing she asks. And as we all know, our kids can make control battles out of breathing …


My answer to this centers on a realization I had years ago when I was doing respite care on a regular basis. When I first started offering respite to families, I offered the kind of respite I knew I had needed for my kids. I wanted someone who didn’t mollycoddle my kids, didn’t make respite more fun and less accountable than home, and most of all, someone who supported and validated me in my efforts to parent oppositional and unattached kids.


When I kept a child for a weekend, I thought the biggest benefit I was providing the parents was a weekend away from the constant struggle, the constant control battles, the constant need to be hypervigilant about everything. I began to realize that for the families who were really about to implode, offering them 48 hours of peace was really more rubbing salt in the wound than it was giving them a break. They had a chance to remember what life was like before they lived the way they were currently living.


Then I realized that the respite care was really more about changing the family dynamics. It was more about taking the power and control away from the kid and returning it to the parent. When parents dropped their snarky kid at my house and left, there was nothing the kid could do at that moment to control them. Nothing. And the kid wasn't successful in controlling me, either! So when the child returned home, finally their parents had some leverage. If all else failed, they could suggest that perhaps Johnny needed to commune with my horses again … i.e. Johnny had some manure to move! Often just the suggestion was enough to impact the child to some extent, at least for awhile.


Regaining control of the household is all about changing the dynamics from parents being on the defensive and in a reactive mode to a situation where the child spends far more time wondering what his parents are going to do next! Parents must be proactive, not reactive.


I'll explain this more in the next blog.


Here's a great article on the argumentative
child.


Here's a post about temper tantrums and another one about kids playing dumb.


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