A combination of flexible and structured discipline emphasizes your child or teen’s strengths while calmly and firmly addressing her need for self-control.  For example, your child’s “strong will” can easily be reframed as “determination”, an ability she can use to improve her self-discipline.

Parents quickly realize that the discipline strategies that work for other kids do not work for their determined child. When parents learn how to bring out the best in their children, they discover incredible possibilities for disciplining her.

Understand Your Determined Child

Determined children do not want to take control away from their parents. Just like other children, they look to their parents to set and maintain healthy limits and boundaries. In contrast, the determined child doesn’t want to lose whatever limited control she has.  Problems occur when the parent limits the determined child’s already limited control by saying phrases like, “You must…” or “Do this right now…” At this point, the determined child uses the only control she has left and she impulsively disobeys.

Parents need to understand that 99% of the time when faced with a power-struggle, their determined child will impulsively disobey or say the wrong thing at the wrong time.  Because impulsivity can make her determination a problem, it is best to start to flexibly teach her how to stop and think before acting instead of getting caught up in the moment and authoritatively sending her to time-out for a week because of her in-born determination. Parents often have to develop tough “Teflon-type” feelings to let the child’s impulsive words and actions roll off them, stay calm, and correct their child without getting caught up in the drama of the moment. Concerning impulsivity, you already know that the word, “STOP!” doesn’t work, so try the suggestions outlined in my previous posts about impulsivity.

Reframe to Maintain Control

When parents motivate, inspire, and cheer their determined child on to success, they find that the battles over control decrease dramatically. Saying, for example, “When you have finished mowing the lawn, then you may go swimming!” works a lot better than, “Don’t even think about going swimming until you have finished mowing the lawn!” The statement, “Get down here right now and eat your breakfast!” can be restated as “A hot yummy breakfast is being served in 2 minutes: come on down and enjoy it!”  Get creative and take advantage of your child’s determination by saying, “Let’s race to get in the car” instead of “Get in this car right this minute!”

The Results of Flexibly Structured Discipline

When parents develop and maintain flexibly structured discipline and a resilient relationship with their determined ADHD child, the child will diligently try to cooperate and keep her parents happy. In contrast, if the determined child sees her parents as spending the majority of their time making demands and yelling at her, she thinks, “Why bother, they’re just going to yell at me anyway.”  She comes to realize that negative attention is better than no attention!

Once your child is convinced of the strength of your love for her, she is more motivated to protect her relationship with you through obedience.  Isn’t that what self-control is all about?

Keep Learning!

Keeping reading the articles in this series to learn how to start building your child’s self-discipline today!

• The Power of Positive Attention

• Giving Effective Instructions

• Eight Steps to Better Behavior

• Five Steps to Reducing Unacceptable Behavior

• Time Out!

• Grounding ( Tweens & Teens)

• Problem Solving (Tweens & Teens)

Need Help with Your Impulsive Determined Child or Teen?

Dr. Davenport is happy to help! He has worked with hundreds of determined children (including his own!) and their families to help improve their lives at home, in school, and on the playground: call us at 817.421.8780 or email us to make an appointment.

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©2012-2019, Monte W. Davenport, Ph.D.