[public_defender]

> fewer than 30 kids.

I agree. And I'll go you one further. I have kids. I also used to work in a psychiatric hospital for kids, so I frequently had 30 and most of them were in the bottom quartile on common "easy to parent" metrics. On my first day a kid had found a lightbulb and broken it. She was threatening to eat it. I was shadowing someone and they sort of nudged me forward to see what I would do. I said, "you'd better not eat that" in a pretty authoritative tone. The kid responded, "or what?"

This was sort of a lightbulb moment for me. It's your first hour on the job, and you've been presented with an "imposing of consequences" dilemma. Your dilemma partner has threatened to eat some broken glass. What result?

Anyway, I obviously didn't escalate with threats of consequences, right? Or my username would be prosecutor. The action:reaction, misbehavior:punishment model operates as violence for some kids. Parenting has to be adaptive and parents have to sort of ride the bronco and parent the kid who shows up that day.

Unfortunately for you, nobody would probably publish a book titled "sometimes you just have to clean the kid's room and still read to them and there are different rules for the older brother but that's all fine and good," but anecdotally that's the truth.

Anyway your parenting experience sounds normal (in the sense that it's normal for a parent to have an uncommonly oppositional kid), so don't feel like you're doing anything wrong. Good luck.

[ZephyrBlu]

Your story is really interesting because it highlights how ineffective consequences can be if someone refuses to cooperate.

I'm curious what you would consider the "correct" approach in that kind of situation is?

[public_defender]

I'm not an academic, but I don't really think there is a correct choice. I think there are strategies that work in the moment to de-escalate. From among those, we often have a choice of damnations regarding long-term goals (e.g. "what will she learn from this if I..."). I think we are often poor estimators of long-term impact, though.

[WesolyKubeczek]

So what did you do with that kid? The suspense is killing me.

[public_defender]

I had to walk back pretty quickly and save the credibility I had. So I pivoted to something like "There is no 'or else,' you'd just better not--as in it would really be better if you did not. I think you'll be pretty sad and miserable if you do that."

This turned out to be a step down the correct path, even if pretty embarrassing in the moment. Someone with a better relationship with the kid stepped in and used that relationship to de-escalate, á la "please don't do that because it will hurt you and I wouldn't like that because I care about you."

What I found to be key in a situation like this was: (1) focus on the person, not the behavior; (2) Have full attention on the situation; (3) try to determine/address root causes. It's obviously impossible to do all that stuff in real life sometimes, but I can try.