During a child’s early adolescence (ages nine to thirteen), parents need to have good conflict avoidance skills because the child will be testing her powers of persuasion and pushing boundaries. You need to know how not to automatically accept every invitation to engage in another dispute. With children at this age, a parent needs to explain and insist, but not defend and rebut. One adult remembered a phrase her farmer father used to limit debate when she was a teenager: “I don’t want to hear your philosophy if it doesn’t grow corn.”
He meant that he was not willing to waste energy in arguing over what did not truly matter. Sometimes out of control teenagers will up the ante in his bid for a conflict with parents, throwing down an outrageous challenge too tempting to refuse, and when a parent picks it up, the fight begins. What the child wants to do is to keep the issue in play at all costs in the hopes that he will wear you down. But he can’t bring you back into the conflict if you decline to argue any further. Threats of extreme action and dire consequences are one ploy a child uses to reengage parents who have said their final word about a lesser disagreement.
Parents should not avoid conflict when confusion or misunderstanding stemming from a disagreement may worsen; when you feel intimidated by your child’s anger, thereby giving her emotionally extortionate power; when your inconsistency in enforcing rules undermines the child’s willingness to comply; when false interpretations and assumptions start distorting what the conflict is actually about; when you store up hurt or resentment because you didn’t speak up; when you create a habit of avoidance that makes it harder to confront the child the next time around;
Do not cooperate with more conflict than you have energy for; but do not avoid conflict when the immediate relief is outweighed by a larger or long-term cost. Parents who are conflict averse with a child when he or she is growing up, avoiding disagreements out of discomfort, refusing to stick to stands or limits when the child argues back, can pay a very painful price for that history of avoidance when the child is grown.
Then, even though love may still be strong, there can be an irrecoverable loss of respect for parents who lacked the courage and commitment to fight with the child for the child’s best interests against what he or she wanted at the time. As for that common rationale for avoiding conflict, “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” this is self-protection in disguise. “I didn’t say anything because if you got upset, I would end up feeling bad.” But be aware of the “conflict fatigue” that comes from cooperating in conflict too much.
In conflict with a child, parental vision often tends to become monocular. They see only the child’s opposition. What they need to maintain is binocular vision—the capacity to see their own behavior and how it interacts with the child’s. As one writer succinctly puts it, taking responsibility for “our own behavior leads the way to family change.”
It is when parents cannot do this that disagreements grow intractable and the lines of opposition become more stubbornly drawn. As long as they continue responding the same way, the child is not likely to change her behavior. The old saw rings true: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you’ve ever got.” Or as Albert Einstein put it, “the definition of insanity is continuing to try the same approach to solve a problem but expecting different results.” When you have a “bedtime problem” with your child, you must change your behavior to help the child change hers.