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The Risks and Impact of Faulty Thinking in Parent-Child Relationships

By Mikki Hogan

The Risks and Impact of Faulty Thinking in Parent-Child Relationships

There are at least seven types of faulty thinking that can undermine parent-child relationships: all-or-nothing thinking, assuming, mind reading, emotionalizing, rule deflation, hypodermic focus and personalizing. In this article, you will learn how these types of faulty thinking directly impact defiant behaviors among children.

Culture of Silence and Anger Displacement.

Not all silent children were born timid. In fact, some of them could be the products of a dysfunctional household that uses a combination of faulty thinking types to create a culture of silence.

Many children who are perpetrators or victims of wrong assumptions, mind reading or personalizing may retreat to silence after several repetitive failed attempts to make a fruitful conversation work. They then suffer the ordeal of being misunderstood and not being trusted, keep ill feelings bottled up and - just like a volcano - wait until an emotional implosion or explosion occurs.

In autocratic households where the parents are always right and where rules are laid out as a dichotomy between appropriate and inappropriate behavior, children may grow resentful and learn to displace anger elsewhere. Without the watchful eye of guardians, the child could exhibit destructive behavior on toys, furniture and other objects that are unable to talk or fight back. A tamed child at home could turn out to be a school bully.

Stereotyping.

At its worst, this form of anti-social behavior can escalate to full-scale racial, gender or age-based discrimination. One of the culprits of this defiant behavior among children is an uncorrected and black-and-white view of the world.

While schools do their share in educating children about equality, parents sometimes forget their main responsibility and influence over the issue. For instance, despite their best intentions, parents who select and judge their children's circle of friends based on definite criteria (parent's income, gender, age) may find themselves guilty of cultivating close-minded views on society: Old people are senile; cheerleaders are flirts; disc jockeys are creeps.

The teenage years of the child could turn out to be a pivotal point of this anti-social behavior, as this period is characterized by the onset of romantic relationships, cliques and the desire to be accepted by peers. Some children may begin questioning and challenging parents about this black-and-white view of things. Others remain blinded from the truth.

Power Struggles.

Instead of fostering a caring atmosphere at home, faulty thinking can pave the way for competition and power struggles between the parent and the child.

In the hypodermic focus, for instance, parents usually get the final say on which misbehavior merits disciplining and which ones go unpunished. The child may submit to the situation at a young age, but as he grows older, will try to turn the tables and emerge the dominant power in the relationship. Teenage years are notably the period when teens act out, learn to talk back and become manipulative. Winning control of the home boils down to whose decisions get followed and who ends up following them.

Desensitization to Lying and Violence.

When lying becomes a convenient escape to getting punished and when violent behavior becomes easily justifiable by emotional highs in the household, children could become prone to engaging in deviant behavior that society highly frowns upon.

Sources point out that lying is actually a coping mechanism that begins during early childhood. The child who is used to deflating rules and emotionalizing will continue to lie his way out of undesirable circumstances until adulthood. The pathological liar is insensitive to the feelings of other people and is rarely capable of feeling genuine remorse for fabricating lies, while the compulsive liar acts like an automatic storyteller and finds it difficult to tell the truth unembellished.

Societal norms against violence will not matter much to the desensitized child. The parents' complacency and total acceptance of the child's violent nature becomes the cloak of protection under which the child hides. He tends to expect the community to be as lenient and as tolerant as his parents on the violent behavior being undertaken.

If there's a common denominator among all the mentioned impacts of faulty thinking on a child's defiant behavior, it's the overall tendency to be uncooperative. Here's one last food for thought for you to ponder on; it's a rhetorical statement by Jane Nelson: "Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?"

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About the Author:

Mikki Hogan, a savvy home-schooler, lives in Southern CA with her four younger children ranging in ages from 8 to 16. When she isn't busy juggling the pleasures of parenting she can be found at her desk working on her internet business. She enjoys a fun evening with the kids watching their dogs play tag in the dining room.

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