Your Defiant Child: Eight Steps to Better Behavior Book

This book was recommended by a counselor who works with many adopted children. At the time we were in desperate need of actual practical solutions to put into place in our lives in order to deal with a child's oppositional defiance. The book gave us exactly what we needed: concrete suggestions for a step-by-step approach to handling oppositional behavior. The suggestion that we used in our family for the longest time was the home token system to reward positive behavior, discourage negative behavior, and give our kids some acceptable control over their lives. We ended up calling this the "chip system" because for a while we used actual game tokens.

Kids with oppositional defiance resist authority in practically every manner in practically every moment of the day. Despite this, they desperately need strong parental figures who can establish firm, fair, and consistent limits. After all, they are only little children. Children want to have control, but they need to have parents establish limits. If parents do not establish limits, the children are left with the horrifying feeling that they are in control, even though they are only little kids who don't know much about life. They are left feeling powerful and really, really scared.

Therefore, parents have to be able to establish limits and consistently maintain those limits. Of course doing this is incredibly draining, especially when you need to be maintain this consistency in the face of violent rage. There are reasons for the behavior of course. Some children who have experienced the profound rejection of relinquishment at an early age subconsciously expect future rejection and therefore act out with worse and worse behavior in an attempt to preempt that rejection and get it over with. Other kids are are deeply shaken by the incredible disruptions in their early life that they had absolutely no control over. No one asked them if they wanted to leave their birthfamilies and go to an orphanage; no one asked them if they wanted to be adopted. Already the base rules of their lives have radically changed multiple times. Who knows what might happen next?

One technique presented in this book is to give the child as many choices as possible throughout the day, even little meaningless choices so that the child begins to feel more secure and so that you avoid giant battles over every little detail. This is how the chip system comes in. The oppositionally defiant child is not just defiant when you tell him to clean his room. He is also defiant when you tell him you are all going to the playground. And so instead of fighting that ridiculous battle, you yield those sorts of decisions to the child. In effect you bargaining with the child, "If you do these things that I want you to, I will give you chips. You can then use those chips to make decisions about how your day will go." Some people call that bribery and say that children should be taught to value good behavior for good behaviors' sake. I say that those people have never tried to raise a child with oppositional defiance.

Sometimes the chip system worked beautifully; sometimes it utterly failed. But overall, I recommend the system (and the book) highly. We even nicknamed the technique the "Cultivating Happiness In Parenting" (CHIP) system.