Parent to six-year-old child: Bobby cut that out… I mean it Bobby stop that right now… Okay, Bobby this time I mean it stop it right now… Okay Bobby I’m going to start counting… Bobby one… Bobby two…
We’ve all seen or heard of situations like this. What’s wrong with Bobby? Is Bobby deaf? No, Bobby has decided not to comply with the instructions from his mother. The next time you see a situation like this and think to yourself “someone should slap the hell out of that kid” consider rephrasing your thought to direct your anger to the real culprit and say to yourself “someone should slap the hell out of that parent (just kidding)”. All kidding aside, in a situation like that the reality is, Bobby is only doing what he has been trained to do.
Fact: When a child gets introduced to a new supervisor for the very first time he or she goes through a BOUNDARY TESTING period to see what, if anything, they can get away with doing.
If you pay attention, you see them attempt to wander off, engage in the adult conversation, or do the thing that their parents just scowled them for doing before they were placed into the custody of the new supervisor.
What they are doing is testing the boundaries to see how liberal the new person is and how strict they are going to be. In the mind of a child strict means, how much attention is paid to them. They instinctively know that the more attention that is paid to them, the less that they can get away with and vice versa.
The more attention that is paid to them the less trouble they can get into, the less attention that is paid to them the more trouble they can get into.) All children do this. You may not have noticed it before, but they do.
Once the child gets a feel for the flexibility of their new supervisor the child conforms to fit the supervisor’s requirements. This happens all the time, with every, normal, child in the world. Children don’t want conflict, they want to be made happy.
The question then becomes, how did the non-compliant state of happening in the opening example? It happened because of neglect on the parent's part and a desire to make their parent happy/ comfortable on the child’s part.
At this point, you’re probably saying to yourself, “how in the world could not listening to a parent make a parent happy or comfortable?” Stick with me…
The first time I witnessed my mother get beat up by her boyfriend I was about four years old. I was awakened in the middle of the night by howls and screams as he pummeled her with his fists. When she tried to fight back the situation would get worse and inevitably the police would be called. The violence continued off and on until I was ten or eleven years old. There were times when the violence and embarrassment of black eyes and a swollen mouth would make her leave him and flee with us to my grandparent's house, but she always went back to the life/beatings she had grown to know her comfort zone.
Children are not born not listening to their parents, they grow into it. In other words, they are unconsciously trained on how not to listen to their parents. A typical scenario of unconsciously training a child how not to listen might look like this: when the child is an infant he or she is constantly told not to do something, they do it anyway and nothing happens (it’s important to understand that nothing ever happens because the parent doesn’t REALLY care if the child does the thing that they are telling them not to do in the first place, so they acquiesce); the child grows to be a toddler and the same thing keeps happening, by the time the child is five or six both they and their parents are “comfortable “ in their routine.
I have an Australian Shepard that I absolutely adore. He is a very smart animal. Every morning when I swing my legs over my bed to get out he runs over, puts his front paws, one on each of my shoulders, and begins to lick my face. Every morning I start the process with a shallow scolding for him not to lick me only to give in after a few licks. My dog and I have developed a comfort zone of non-compliance. He has figured out that his licking my face to wake me in the morning makes me happy.
Recently, I have noticed that when my dog and I are in the backyard it is getting increasingly more difficult for me to get him to listen to me on the first, second and even the third command sometimes. His non-compliance with my commands to make me happy has started to put his life in danger.
It’s gotten so bad that when I walk down to the mailbox on the side of the road in front of my house where trucks and cars whip by at high rates of speed I take him in the house for fear that he won’t listen to me, run into the street and get hit by a vehicle. I have unwittingly created a very dangerous situation.
Currently, I am taking the steps necessary to reverse the non-compliance syndrome before he gets hurt, and that is I make a conscious effort to make sure that when I tell him to do something he does it immediately, not when he gets ready to.
