Book Excerpt: How to Discipline a Defiant Child

Jan. 14, 2008 — -- It's a common complaint among parents: Children don't come with manuals.

Now, one psychology professor aims to help parents navigate the difficult road to raising children with his new book.

Author and Yale University professor Alan Kazdin has taken his 30 years of work with children and transformed it into a step-by-step guide for parents in "The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child." Kazdin offers tips for the most common concerns, including disciplining a child and how to use the tone of your voice.

For more information check out the book excerpt below.

Your four-year-old's tantrums have become more frequent and intense; they have started to dominate the life of your household. He's not just yelling and screaming anymore — now he throws things, hits, and kicks, too. The bedtime tantrum is the most predictable one, and the one that disrupts home life the most, but he has also taken his show on the road. You've been late to work recently because he melts down in the morning when you leave him at daycare. After other spectacular public performances at the supermarket, restaurants, and family gatherings, none of which you handled very well, you are sure that others see you as an incompetent parent — and you are starting to wonder if they might be right. And, deeper than that, it frightens you to feel the situation slipping beyond your control. You're losing your confidence that you can govern your child, your household, and when you lose your temper, yourself.

You want your nine-year-old to work with you, not against you. You're not asking for blind compliance, but more cooperation would be nice. Right now, she seems to fight you every step of the way, from getting up for school in the morning through homework and dinner and computer or TV time. Sometimes she insists on complete freedom and autonomy; sometimes she acts as if you have to do everything for her. She bickers incessantly with her sister, too. Is it asking too much for you to have a little peace around the house? You're tired of laying down the law, trying to understand her point of view, and using every other strategy that hasn't worked. Frankly, you are fed up with your own child. You find yourself wistfully wondering why you weren't one of the lucky ones who got a nice, easy kid to raise.

Your thirteen-year-old gives you nothing but attitude. On a couple of occasions, he has stolen something or committed an act of vandalism, the most worrisome pieces of a larger pattern of defying authority. You tell yourself that he's going through a phase, that he's just a normal preadolescent, but you fear that he may be heading toward serious trouble. You have tried to talk to him in every way you can think of — punishing, explaining, begging, crying — but nothing works. Your spouse says you are exaggerating, but you feel it's time to face the seriousness of what's happening to your family. Your child has a good heart, but that doesn't keep you from feeling always a little on edge, not knowing when the next crisis will develop.

Should you be addressing these problems now, before they lead to more serious ones? Or should you wait to see if a particular problem resolves itself? Perhaps you've gone online, Googled "tantrum" or "defiant child," and found that your child's behavior fits a dire-sounding label. Perhaps you're more concerned than your spouse is, or vice versa, and it's becoming a bone of contention between you — two devoted parents who find themselves disagreeing about what's wrong, how serious it is, how to put it right, or whether to try to fix it at all.

The tangle of confusion, frustration, fear, and anger inside you turns spending time with your child into a wearisome, long-running confrontation, even a chore that you secretly dread, and that feels very wrong to you. You've become a character you don't really recognize, or recognize all too well as the kind of parent you never wanted to be: a frequently irate, sometimes out-of-control shouter who spends altogether too much time ineffectively nagging, threatening, punishing, and even hitting the very child you love as much as you have ever loved or could ever love anyone. You feel off-balance, strange to yourself. You need a better way to be a parent, but you haven't gotten much useful help from the models you may have turned to: the way your parents, bless their hearts, did it; the many ways the child-rearing manuals suggest you do it; the way Supernanny does it on TV. With professional experts of all kinds promising that their way works, with friends and friends of friends telling you stories about how so-and-so's kid was turned around by a new parental strategy or miracle diet or whatever, it's hard to figure out what actually will work for you and your child.

There is a way to establish what actually does work. It's called science. To most people as they go about their daily lives, "science" means subjects such as the discovery of water on Mars, how birds spread influenza, and what trans fats do to our bodies. All of these are important and consistently newsworthy, without doubt, but science has also been quietly pressing forward in the effort to understand child development, child-rearing, parent-child interaction, and all sorts of other matters that affect your child's social, emotional, and behavioral adjustment.

Within the extensive research on human behavior in general, a great deal tells us specifically about the behavior of children. You may be surprised to hear that scientists have studied the most effective way to give a command to a child, or that they have rigorously compared the effectiveness of rewarding good behavior and punishing misbehavior. There are even studies that tell us very specific things like, for instance, the most effective way to speak to a child when asking her to do something she'd prefer not to do: brush her teeth, wear a jacket, get off the phone, or go to bed on time. Obviously, very few parents have the time or training to get up to speed on the latest research in psychology, not to mention child development and neurobiology and all the many related fields. But they can benefit profoundly from what researchers have discovered.

In this book, I present a method for changing your child's behavior that is based on good science — on what we currently know about children's behavior from the results of sound, well-conducted studies. I do not offer impressionistic beliefs or unsupported opinions about childhood. I'll be telling you something about the research and basic principles that underlie this approach, so you get a sense of why it works, but my emphasis will be on what to do and how to do it.

One great virtue of the method is that the same principles and techniques apply to the full range of situations for children and adolescents. I'm talking about everything from the milestones of normal child development —