There is not a parent anywhere in the world that believes it is a good idea to punish good behaviour and reward bad, but, as I will show you here, most parents of 'badly' behaving children, who are intelligent and well-meaning people, do exactly this. I was going to say 'in blissful ignorance' but when parents do not realise their reactions are reversed in this way they create anything but bliss.

Clearly, each inappropriate behaviour that a youngster enacts, even if caused by major neurological or mental defects or illness, has to be handled and responded to by those in immediate proximity. Even severely autistic behaviour has to be handled, has to be responded to, and the responses used are precious because they represent the only mechanism available to us to move the child closer to social fulfilment. Sometimes when a child is diagnosed with ADHD parents are relieved, they think that they no longer have to agonise about how to respond to their child's behaviour since it clearly was never their problem in the first place and surely with the diagnosis will come practical advice about how to handle the behaviour. They are often mistaken; parental response to the behaviour of children with diagnosed disorders is even more crucial and needs to be even more precise than with ordinary children and advice about these responses rarely follows a diagnosis.

If our responses are vital for an autistic or ADHD child, internally programmed to behave differently for the 'badly' behaved child they are doubly important. They don't just represent our only tool to change the behaviour they are also in most cases the main reason for it.

The only mechanism available

Apart from the use of drugs parents do not have a single direct mechanism to change their child's behaviour. Not one. The only mechanism available to change it is their response to it, in other words their own behaviour. This means that if behaviour isn't changing following the use of their current responses then these responses have to change. Parents need to ask 'are we repeating what clearly does not work?' 'Are we responding on instinct, or using tit bits of information from relatives or friends or attempting to apply platitudinous advice form books? Do we really have a strategy?'

As conscientious parents striving always to do our best we can accept that modifying our response to "bad behaviour" is the only method available to change it, we find it much harder to accept that, in all likelihood, it was our previous responses that caused it in the first place.

The word 'blame' comes with more than one meaning. I insisted that a national paper retract the claim that I blame parents for "bad behaviour". How could I blame parents who are attempting to follow advice from professionals from books, from newspapers, from their parents from friends even from the problematic children themselves? How could parents, who almost always are doing their best, be blamed? Clearly they can't - it would be unfair. Yet the fact remains that "bad behaviour" does not grow spontaneously within the children displaying it, and parents are never the simple victims of it.

Children are trapped into behaving badly by the responses chosen by their parents, who are themselves trapped by their inability to see the causal connection. Historically parents have always believed that the immaturity; personality; heredity; poor temper control; strong will or selfishness of the child cause 'bad' behaviour. They can see, it is very clear, that their child behaves 'badly' in spite of how they currently react to the behaviour. It is more difficult for them to realise that in reality their child behaves 'badly' because of the way they react. The problem for parents is that their response to the behaviour also acts as the antecedent that triggers the child's decision to enact the next inappropriate behaviour or not. Parents often get this response wrong and their child's 'Bad' behaviour becomes interactive and circular.

There is not a child or adolescent in the world that continues to put effort into a behaviour that no longer works for them in some way. Children are skilled and dedicated time and motion specialists and have a very clear idea what will happen when they misbehave. They never go into the tunnel of "bad behaviour" without clear light from the other end. The source of their knowledge is simple - what happened last time. At some level parents know that their child must be getting something from all this "bad" behaviour, but they are at a loss to work out what this "something" might be.

Scenario one
From a worried mother:
"Apart from always arguing and not wanting to do as he is told, I am becoming increasingly worried by my son's obsessive behaviour. He is six. He must have his socks at just the right height and when he is tucked in he has to have the bedclothes 'just so.' Sometimes I have to go back five times before he is satisfied. I am very worried what should I do."

Scenario Two
I am standing with a friend in the garden of her house watching her children play when her 4-year-old son pushes off the top of a slide and deliberately slams into the back of his 18-month-old sister, who is yet to clear the bottom. His mother is angry and takes him aside. "Why did you do that?" she asks, holding his arms, shaking him, she fixes him with her eyes for an intense moment before releasing him.

Scenario Three
From a worried father:
Having to implement anything will just be a fight and he has started to push me around. If I'm really honest I'm starting to feel frightened of James. With this constant the swearing going on when his is on his interactive computer game I go and knock on his door and say James 'this is going to have to stop' then he says "Fuck of Dad, get out leave me alone this has nothing to do with you…bla bla" so I say "OK James then you're not allowed to play on it tomorrow your going to have a day off from the game". Then that never happens because I don't follow it through because he says "if you touch it that I'm going to kill you" and hassles me out.

Scenario Four
I am taking questions from a large room full of professionals gathered together in Ireland. A social worker describes a meeting he had with a female client whom he was advising how to handle aggressive behaviour when his clients son bursts in and is swears at them both and is physically threatening. He watches the parent attempt to "tell off" the boy then, exasperated, he also informs the child firmly how and why this behaviour is completely unacceptable. Neither response has any effect on the behaviour. He asks me what he should have advised the mother to do.

Scenario five
A client of mine, also a behaviour professional, had a 13-year-old daughter with whom he was having serious problems. His daughter's problems were compounded by her refusal to go to sleep at a reasonable time. Today she is getting herself ready to go to a social event at her old primary school and is self-conscious about her appearance as she will be meeting her old primary school friends. She comes to her mother for a dab of make-up to cover a spot on her forehead. Her father chooses this moment to point out that she also has very large dark rings under her eyes.

Many of us only think we understand what things actually reward or sanction children's behaviour. In the first this mother is worried that her son "obsessive". The fact that her son asks her to repeat a comforting behaviour that delays her departure is perfectly understandable but when this mother decides to come back 5 times to do what has already been done it is she who trains him to be obsessive. She places herself squarely in a non-logical world from which she cannot begin to help him. By failing to recognise the real motive behind the request she then goes on to demonstrate that coming back 5 times redo what has already been done is not illogical not obsessive. It is her response alone that created and now maintains the behaviour.

In the second scene the parent responds to her son's dangerous behaviour towards his little sister with an angry and intense question. This response is so common and we have heard it used so often that we have probably never thought what a very strange question it is. How is the child supposed to respond? Both of us had seen the deliberation on her son's face when he pushed off with the sole intention of hurting his sister. It is not difficult to work out that jealousy was the motive for this behaviour. His behaviour is not thought out, it is a basic simple physical behaviour that needs a quick simple non-physical response - a sanction or a warning of a sanction. Yet, my friend asks her son a question "Why did you do that?" that he cannot answer honestly. The honest answer is "because I wanted to" or even "because I wanted to hurt Sarah" but my friend would be horrified if he told the truth. If she continues to use this response she will end up training him to lie. When he hangs his head as she asks her question she is fooled into thinking that a 4-year-old has a moral sense and feels shame about what he has done; shame that will stop him repeating it. She "sanctions with shame". In reality she is teaching her son to look for excuses for behaviour that, for him, should have no excuse. She has already taught him that she will not stop her intense waiting for an answer until he hangs his head and he soon learns that hanging his head will be the only consequence or sanction he need worry about. If she does make him feel bad it will be with anger and resentment not shame. He will be resentful that once again his mother protects his sister and tells him off. Her sanction does not target her son's behaviour but his self-esteem. She thinks that if he feels guilty and less likely to repeat the behaviour but in fact she leaves him resentful, looking for the next opportunity to be spiteful. It is a common mistake to think that by itself repeatedly indicating dissatisfaction acts as a sanction. In fact if it has not worked the first or second time it is clearly not going to work at all. Continuing to use it gives attention and, just like a reward, increases the frequency of the behaviour. See - Rewarding "bad" behaviour - Two Targets Chapter 13

The third scene describes perfectly how parents reward and increase the frequency of temper tantrums without the child even having to enact them. When his son continually and loudly swears on his computer his father knows that this behaviour is inappropriate, knows that a sanction is needed, knows what that sanction ought to be, informs the child what the sanction will be, then fails to carry it out. He understands and does everything that is required except provide the consequence. It would be far better if he did not confront this behaviour at all if he is not going to see it through to a consequence. This is depressingly common. Parents in situations like this often describe their children as having a "strong will", which, even if true, is not causal. This father uses the increase in the intimidating statements from his son as his reason for not carrying out the sanction when in reality the causal connection is the other way round, because he does not carry out the sanction his son continues and increases the intimidatory statements when a sanctions are mentioned. In a reversal of roles, he changes his own behaviour because of his son's threatened sanction.

In the fourth scene the social worker wants to know what he should have advised the mother to do following her son's abuse and intimidation. I asked him the question that always has to be asked "what was the consequence for this behaviour?" As is so often the case their was no consequence apart from the "strong words". So, just like the boy's mother, he showed dissatisfaction without warning the boy about any tangible sanction. Repeated dissatisfaction has a negative effect but only on the child's self-esteem. Dissatisfaction eventually tends to embolden the child and ends up acting like a reward for the "bad" behaviour. The smallest tangible sanction would be more effective than this. .See - Chapter 13

In the fifth scene the father points out the effects of his daughter refusal to keep a reasonable bedtime - dark rings under her eyes - at a time when she is not refusing to go to bed and he is most liable to damage her self-esteem. Since his daughter is not behaving badly and is in fact behaving reasonably he sanctions her when he should be positive. She will feel, not unreasonably, that he has just found an excuse to hurt her and will look for the next opportunity, probably at bedtime, to give him a hard time. Dissatisfaction and sanctions deployed at the wrong time increase rather than decrease problem behaviour.

What makes parents respond in these ways?

I had been encouraging a client to use small sanctions rather than angry shouting. He told his 8-year-old daughter that she must stop being so rude, saying, "I don't want to take some of your computer time away." She said, "Well if you don't want to take it away, don't do it." Of course, she had not really misunderstood what he meant. She must have understood very well to deliberately misinterpret what he meant in this way. Our children are quite capable of understanding our reasons and our rules, but they are also capable of using them against us. Why? Why is it that they continually search for counter-arguments? Why are they so defiant so much of the time? Why do they appear so strong-willed that they never seem to tire in their attempts to wear us down? In particular, why do they get so indignant? Where on earth does all their anger come from?

The answer is that what the parent and what the child thinks is happening during these repeated interactions is very different. Interacting with badly behaved children is like dealing with a different species from a different world.