Some days parenting feels like one long argument.
Put your shoes on.
Brush your teeth.
Stop hitting your brother.
Turn the screen off.
Get in the car.
Come and eat.
Go to bed.
Things that seem like they should be simple somehow become enormous.
And after enough of those days, it is very easy to start wondering:
Why is my kid like this?
Lots of things cross our minds.
Are they lazy? Defiant? Maybe they just don’t care?
Or maybe it’s us.
Maybe we’ve been too soft. Too strict. Everyone else seems to have it figured out.
It’s all valid. We’ve all been there.
But bad behaviour isn’t a personality trait.
Often, there’s something in the picture we’re missing.
When I see behaviour that is intense, confusing or inconsistent, I tend to wonder about three things.
What are the inputs a child is managing?
Is the environment noisy, unpredictable, overwhelming, uncomfortable, or simply demanding more of them than we realise?
What is the situation asking them to do?
Maybe they need to wait, shift plans, find words, remember several steps, control an impulse, tolerate frustration, or understand something they haven’t fully learnt yet.
And then:
Are they regulated enough to actually access that ability right now?
A child may have a skill and still struggle to use it when they are tired, hungry, stressed, overloaded, or already running out of capacity.
That is why a child can cope beautifully one day and completely fall apart the next.
The skill may not have disappeared.
Something around it changed.
That does not mean behaviour does not matter
Kids still need boundaries.
They still learn what works.
Sometimes they really are avoiding something they do not want to do.
Understanding what sits underneath behaviour does not mean accepting hitting, screaming, or disrespect.
It just means I do not want to decide what the behaviour means too quickly.
Because the response to an overwhelmed child should look different from the response to a child who is missing a skill.
And both should look different from the response to a child who has learnt that arguing gets the demand removed.
Same behaviour as the outcome.
Completely different problems underneath it.
You do not have to work it all out in the moment
This is the part where I see parents get stuck.
You do not need to diagnose every meltdown.
You do not need to understand exactly why your child is refusing while you are standing in the hallway already ten minutes late.
Sometimes the first step is simply noticing:
Something about this is harder for them than it looks.
Then later, when everybody has settled, you can ask:
What was coming in?
What was being asked of them?
Was there a skill missing?
Or was a skill they normally have suddenly much harder to access?
That gives us a much better place to start than:
What is wrong with my kid?
Because you do not have a bad kid.
You have a child whose behaviour is giving you information.
Our job is not to judge the output too quickly.
It is to work out what might be sitting underneath it.
Behaviour is the output. We should understand the system behind it.
Read next
Won’t, Can’t, or Can’t Right Now?
Because those three things can look almost identical from across the room, but they need very different responses.