Your Defiant Child: Review

I studied this book as my primary source in preparing and drafting my second crime/mystery book. That is one reason why I mostly substituted the word ‘child’ with ‘defiant’. The other reason is I’m trying to apply the book context to retarded adults rather than to defiant children. Retarded adults are children anyway right?

Besides so many children around me who are showing signs of becoming sociopaths, there are more adults who are acting like children. Many defiant children become adult psychos or sociopaths then some become serial murderers. I will use the reviewed book to explain why and how the criminal became a sociopath in my book.

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The whole family can lose its affection for each other. Parents blame each other for the destructive behavior of the defiant one. Siblings can end up hostile toward parents and the defiant sibling. That’s how one defiant can bring the whole family down.

Important Facts to Remember

The defiant’s behavior is all up to you. Why? Because the greatest potential for control of the defiant’s behavior is in the environment and the enormous part of the environment is YOU.

The defiant acts the way he do because he can’t see things the way you do, i.e., difference of perspectives.

The fastest way to determine why the defiant acts the way he do is to look at yourself. Can you see the defiant’s attitude in yourself? If so, you are the problem or the root of it.

You encourage bad behavior to get worse when you show you have a breaking point and use cumulative punishment. You finally lose patience and decide to punish or give up and temporarily reward defiant behavior thereby creating a time bomb — the inevitable physical violence.

Overreacting suddenly to a certain defiant’s behavior will prevent the defiant from learning specific consequences for specific types of misbehavior. The defiant can’t build a predictable framework of action and reaction without that learning. Offer incentives like ‘reward points’ instead of using punishment.

What I think the book missed is giving stress to the fact that failure is not bad. In fact failing is actually good because we cannot learn until we fail. I not only missed my childhood. It was also a mess because my father was a perfectionist. Guess how that affected me. Yes. He never taught me that failure is good but instead coerced me to be ‘perfect’.

Remember, this is just a fraction of what I learned from the book.