Why Does My Child Do This?

Posted by Brad Reedy, Ph.D., Owner & Clinical Director at Evoke Therapy Programs on June 20, 2016

Parents are often exasperated by their child’s poor behavior and choices. The child is behaving in a way that goes against all of the family’s values and morals. With that backdrop, and the obvious negative consequences that child is experiencing due to their behavior, “Why does my child do this,” is a question often asked in desperation by loving parents.

Let me start with the simplest answer: because it works. Let’s first start with that conclusion and work our way backwards to find out how it works and what is resulting from the destructive decisions of the child.

In the 1960s, a team of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists founded the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California. This team was interested in systems, specifically family systems, and they wanted to understand the complex interactions and transactions that occurred in individual family units. They observed a number of families by watching them in their homes and by watching recordings. During their observations, they witnessed families struggling with a myriad of life’s stresses. Family illnesses, job difficulties, children’s learning differences, and so on. Yet over the course of their observations, they began to see that it was not the life stressors that defined the magnitude and scope of the family’s problem, but rather the solutions that each family instituted to deal with those stressors that were the source of the problems. The researchers surmised that the family’s actual problems could be defined by a family’s attempt to solve those problems—Dad getting angry and yelling at a child for having struggles in school, Mom nagging the children to clean up, a child hitting his brother for coming in his room, or a child yelling at her sister for borrowing her dress. Thus, we see that it is not our actual problem that is truly the problem; it is our attempt to solve that problem that becomes truly problematic.

Let’s return to Jung’s idea, “Neurosis is a substitute form of legitimate suffering.” This statement mirrors the conclusions of the MRI group. The development of symptoms was an inauthentic way of dealing, but it was that person’s best attempt to solve their angry or hurt feelings or to change their situation. Even though a lot of the choices our children make seem irrational and illogical, there is a simple logic at the root of their behavior, illustrated in some of these thoughts:

• The pain of this behavior is better than the pain that would come from not behaving in this way.
• I would rather be in trouble with my parents than continue to feel like an outcast or an outsider with my peers.
• I would rather fail than feel the fear of failure.
• I would rather cut myself and feel that pain rather than having a lack of feeling.
• I would rather not eat than feel the fear of not fitting in.
• I would rather drink or smoke pot and feel this “high" rather than feel stressed or bored or insecure
• I would rather “piss off my parents” than feel the crushing guilt and disappointment of trying to please them and failing at it.

This last sentiment is one that many parents are surprised at. Many of the students I have worked with over the years entered the program sporting the rough exterior of “I don't give a shit what you think about me,” but revealed themselves over time to be children haunted by the chronic anxiety of wanting to please others. This shows up obviously in the peer pressure dynamic that many parents can identify with. It also shows up in relationships with authority figures and parents.

When I was in high school, I was considered by many of my teachers as bright. Knowing this made me feel like I was carrying an enormous weight on my shoulders. There was a teacher who I particularly admired who taught ninth-grade world history. He was cool, enthusiastic, and showed a liking towards me. Three weeks into the course, we got our first quiz. It was a simple 15-question “true or false” format. I decided to answer every question wrong (although I really did miss one, and so I got one answer right). After the next class period, my teacher asked me to stay late. He showed me my results and asked me to explain myself. “I guess I just didn't know the material,” I responded coolly.

“Why did you mark these answers wrong when I know that you know that you really do know the right answers?” He gently asked. Still, I didn't budge. He finally sent me away, informing me as I left that he was going to give me 14 out of 15. As the class progressed, I employed more subtle forms of failure in order to avoid such interviews, and I eventually ended up with my first D ever.

This example of my behavior illustrates the dynamic of not trying at all rather than feeling the fear that comes with knowing that you might fail if you do actually try. I thought that it was better for me to fail and deal with all that came with that D instead of trying my best and getting an A- or a B and revealing myself as an ordinary student. Again, in Nurture Shock, the authors explain how our praise of a child’s gifts often leads to them trying to rebel against that gift by cheating, lying, or by any other means possible. The praise makes them feel special, but then anything less than special becomes terrifying. Bronson and Merryman go on to explain how praising the effort rather than the outcome reinforce the “trying” aspect, and this can solve the problem.

A staff member at an eating disorder clinic I visited to give a lecture on addiction brought another example of this “trying to fail” or “not trying to avoid failure” to my attention. A young woman, anorexic and starving herself to death, showed up to one of my lectures and was confronted by the staff for wearing layers of oversized clothes. “Doesn't layering and baggy clothing makes them look heavier?” I later asked a staff member.

She informed me, “Sometimes, they wear extra or baggy clothes because their low body weight leaves them susceptible to cold, or because they are trying to hide their low body weight from staff or from parents. Another reason, however, is that if they believe that others see them as fat, then they can blame the clothes. If I try to look fat and am seen as fat, then that is better than trying to be thin and failing.”

Children steal, lie, drug, cut, starve, or skip school for many reasons that alleviate a particular unwanted feeling or anxiety, and one of the reasons that they do these things is to deal with the enormous weight of the hopes and dreams that parents have for them and fearing that they will be unable to fulfill them.

In the Wilderness Therapy milieu, assignments are given to help children learn why they do what they do. These assignments help kids figure out “why” they do what they do. These assignments teach a principle or skill and are often given in the form of a letter. Some are formal assignments, and some come in the natural narrative of the program. Children will be asked to respond to their parent’s “Impact Letter,” which is basically an intervention letter. This “Impact Letter” response often contains apologies, promises, anger, denial, and a host of rich emotions and is a good baseline for giving the child an honest look at their behavior and how it has impacted both their parent and others around them. While the range of responses to the “Impact Letter” is broad, the child is often eager to have their parents read their response, which we call the “Letter of Accountability.” This is a pretty straightforward letter that allows the child to show their parent that they are “on their way”—that they are coming clean and starting anew.

There are other letters that aren’t written so easily. “The Benefits of Destructive Behaviors” letter is one that is supposed to identify the needs met by the identified “maladaptive” behaviors that initially led to an intervention. Students are often reluctant to admit that their behavior caused an intervention. They want to communicate no ownership, both internally and externally. It’s the idea that “this is happening to me, and I am the victim.” They want to distance themselves from the old problem behavior; they don't want to discuss any of its virtues. When I ask a depressed child to help me create a list of the benefits that come from being depressed, he’ll look at me incredulously and say, “There are no benefits!” When I ask a marijuana user what the benefits of smoking pot are, he’ll often say, “I really didn't like pot all that much,” even though he had been using it daily for a year before coming to the program. These protestations almost always mask a fear that such an admission would lead to more accountability as well as an underlying shame that comes from acknowledging their contribution to their destructive behavior. This accountability could then lead to others holding them responsible for their choices, and that’s frightening for many of them. The shame could lead to the exploration of the needs and feelings they have been working to ignore and suppress. Acknowledging their behavior, they believe, could lead to a scary and vulnerable place.

There is an adage used in recovery programs that says, talking about the purpose of drug use ruins it. You begin to identify the escape with what you’re trying to escape from, and you ruin the “high” because it ceases to produce the desired feeling and actually triggers you to think about why you are using. That is why we look underneath. A therapist will ask a client that ever-riddling question: “How do you feel?” Truly feeling is, as Jung says, part of “legitimate suffering,” and by experiencing that legitimate suffering, the process of healing can begin.

In my work with anorexic young people, I saw many profound examples of finding legitimate feelings. These clients, usually young girls, could resemble a skeleton with skin, yet their body image was so distorted that they constantly believed that they were overweight. What would your response be to a 5’6” young woman weighing 90 pounds that expressed to you that she thought she was fat? Most of us would respond with a logical and incredulous, “You’re not fat! You are skin and bones; you’re nearly wasting away!” Well, if that response worked, then these young women wouldn't be starving to death. They have been told that enough. Many people—teachers, friends, parents, and sometimes, even professionals—talk about the symptoms rather than the underlying emotion. Those emotions might be fear, anxiety, failure, rejection, or insecurity about being loved. In any case, if we talk about weight or food with an anorexic patient, then we fall into the trap set up by the disease. This understanding leads us to talk about feelings or dilemmas rather than the outward symptom manifestations. In working with these young patients, I sometimes even took the provocative approach of agreeing with the client, “Yes, you are a little pudgy. Mind if I call you Pudgy?” …Now that that's out of the way, can we talk about how you’re feeling today? Can we talk about whether you think I like you or care about you, about whether you think you matter to others? These are things that I can discuss. These are things that I can understand, that I can support. But I can’t have an insane debate about whether or not you’re thin. That topic is off the table.”

A couple of precautions when trying to understand the “why” of what your child is doing. Sometimes, parents put boundaries and consequences aside in order to attempt to understand their children’s behaviors. It almost feels like if we can understand why a child is behaving in a certain way if we can just find the cause, then consequences will not be necessary. In these cases, empathy robs the accountability. This is the same flawed reasoning people have when they talk about criminals or sex abusers. “He was abused as a child, so that explains his actions.” This line of reasoning misses the idea that we can both understand our children as well as present them with consequences to their behavior. I can understand that my husband suffers from alcoholism and that he was genetically and perhaps even environmentally predisposed to having this disease. Yet, I can take care of myself. I can set boundaries. I can also file for divorce, sue for custody of my children in order to ensure that they are safe, and embark on a healthy, self-nurturing life. The beauty of this stance is that the boundary comes not out of anger, but out of love. It comes out of love for ourselves and for others. It comes from a place of compassion and non-judgment.

Another possibly dangerous outcome of solely focusing on the reasons our children do what they do is the ensuing belief that if you understand your child, then you can reason them out of their negative behaviors. This desire to logically reason with a child is seductive for parents. We love to talk. We love to hear ourselves talk. We love the euphoria that comes when we have an epiphany or an “aha” experience. However, understanding or insight into our child’s behaviors does not need to exclude setting boundaries or consequences. Ideally, we need to be capable of both understanding our children as well as having a healthy detachment in order to be able to present them with consequences. Discipline with this quality of empathy is evidence that parents are disciplining with the best interests of their children in mind instead of out of some sort of anger, resentment, or other misguided motivation.

Understanding crazy

I think part of our inability to understand our children may be because they are manifesting something in ourselves that we have not made peace with. It may be something we discarded a long time ago, some characteristic that we don't currently manifest, but discarding it is not the same as making peace with it. So our children invite us to look at that part and we say, “I don't understand you.” But what we mean is that we don't like it and we can’t see it in our children because if we did, it would terrify us. And our constant questioning of them and to them of ”Why are you doing this?” is really just the message, “please stop, you are hurting me, frustrating me, or scaring me.”

One barrier that prevents many parents from moving forward is realizing that it is not healthy or even possible to understand some irrational types of behavior. For example, we might have a loved one that struggles with severe mental illness or addiction, and their experiences may be beyond our rational ability to understand. As parents, we more commonly see our children suffering from the “disease of childhood.” At times, this “disease” renders them incapable of rational thought and prevents them from seeing the connection between cause and effect or from understanding how the future relates to their current behavior. Then you, their parent, will be in a state of disbelief and will inevitably ask, “Why did you do that?” The child’s answer, “I don't know” will simply be an honest response.

A few years ago, my four children sat eating at the dinner table. Isabella, who was seven at the time, was eager to share some of her newfound knowledge of science with the family. She looked at my son Jake, 16-years-old at the time, and said, “I know why you are sometimes not nice to me. My teacher said you are missing the front part of your brain and that makes it so you are not always thinking right.”

After a few chuckles from the table, Jake retorted, “Yeah, well you are missing that part of your brain, too!”

And again, the lesson is this: the executive part of the brain—the part of the brain that is rational and logical—is not fully developed in the average person until the mid- to late-twenties. Children are operating from a more primitive part of the brain, and their brains actually lack some of the structure it requires to comprehend and retain the kind of reasoning that adults and parents can master.

This primitive brain vs. higher brain dichotomy explains why talk therapy or well-structured lectures are not the solution with young children. Much of our trauma and difficulties are registered and stored in the lower limbic part of the brain. This is the “fight or flight” part of the brain, and it’s reactive and necessary for survival. As we grow, the top and front parts of the brain develop. The adult brain is not just more developed, but it is of a different quality than a child’s brain.

In graduate school, at Loma Linda University, a local sheriff came to speak to the class about child abuse and the laws about reporting it. He told graphic stories of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. One thing he told us that day struck me deeply. He said that a common thread of child abuse was that the parent expected skills, insight, or behavior from the child that their young brain was not capable of forming. Parents who yelled, scolded, or hit a child for doing something like drawing on the walls or spilling a glass of milk did not understand that a child has a different developmental level than an adult. The makeup of the nerves in their brain do not give young children the coordination that adults have that can allow them to easily manage their bodies and prevent them from spilling milk, which is something that is completely normal for many children to do.

So in our attempts to understand our children and their behavior, we delay or prevent a crucial task in parenting—regulating that very behavior. As adults, we are obsessed with “understanding crazy.” Many of us love shows that talk about psychopaths. We enjoy watching forensic psychologists explain the mind of a criminal on our one-hour weekly crime drama shows. But this obsession to understand the behavior of our children can hamper our ability to fully execute our job as parents and as caregivers.

When parents send their children to the therapeutic program I run, the first thing they want to find out is the “root cause” of their child’s behaviors. Many parents are aware that symptomatic behavior most often originates from some unwanted, unfelt, or unexpressed emotion, and that understanding leads them on a fishing expedition. Perhaps the answer will give them some comfort because it will lead to a solution. Or perhaps the dilemma to understand the child is a way to suggest, “that they ought not to be struggling.” Nevertheless, over the years in my work as a therapist, I have become a skilled fisherman and guide. But it is the child’s job to learn how to fish or seek out the depths of themselves. So, I explore with the child. I help them to look in the typical areas—adoption, divorce, abuse, a grandparent’s death and so on.

When working with adopted children struggling with behavioral problems, I often asked them how they thought adoption has impacted them. Most commonly, the child would respond in her initial interview with something like, “It is irrelevant. It has had no impact on me.” Even when a child presented me with that response, I encouraged her to read a book about adoption. Later, during a subsequent visit, it was not uncommon for that same student to report that she had “figured it all out,” and that being adopted was what she was really struggling with. I then would agree that I did indeed think it was a part of the picture, but it wasn’t the whole thing. “It is somewhere between ‘it has no impact on my life’ and ‘it explains everything about why I am struggling.’ It is a piece in the puzzle that makes up your life.”

Parents too often want to pinpoint a particular event that has led to the child’s current behavioral problems. “Was it the adoption? Was it the divorce? Is it parental conflict, stress peer conflict, or sibling conflict?” Parents often want a clear, clean, and simple explanation. They believe that if they can just get that answer, then they can manage their children’s behavior. But here is what you must remember: “Give a man a fish, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.” This is the process of therapy with struggling children. Applying your fishing techniques as a parent to find the problem is a temporary solution. The goal is to teach the child how to fish for himself—to teach him to address his feelings, to understand them, and to see how they are affecting him. That's why what seems like a cliché question in therapy—“How do you feel?”—is very important. We are teaching people how to feel, teaching children how to feel. With behavioral management techniques, we are cutting off easy access to escape routes, shortcuts, and dead ends and instead providing tools for feeling. One very simple way to describe the process of therapy is that it teaches people how to feel by talking about their feelings.

To emphasize this point, I will suggest to parents that for most of their children, the hardest things—the most painful things—have not yet happened to them. I will encourage them to think back on their own lives. For many parents, although life was challenging as a young person, many of our greatest challenges and pains came later in adulthood. Regardless of whether or not that is true for everyone, good therapy teaches us how to feel by providing skills and creating the perspectives to deal with life’s difficulties in a more tolerable way.

So we try to teach our children how to allow themselves to feel and then to deal with those feelings. We don’t tell them how to feel, but we show them how to explore their feelings. We don’t give them the fish, but we instead hand them the rod and teach them how to use it. In a very practical example, a child may respond with a sarcastic comment during a therapeutic group activity and the therapist might ask, “What was that about?” Most likely the child will respond with “Nothing, no big deal…” Then, we stop what we are doing and spend the next hour or two gently encouraging a discussion that starts with the sarcastic comment and might lead to a difficult letter from a parent, a conflict earlier in the day with the staff, or a hurtful exchange between a peer and the focus of our group. In the end, the child is able to learn, for herself, why she did what she did and what she was feeling. I listened to an alumni student of our program speaking to a group of parents. With excitement, he explained, “One of the coolest things I learned is that now I often know what people are feeling and thinking, even if they don’t know it themselves or haven’t expressed it.” This increase in awareness comes as one learns “how to feel.”

Thus, it becomes the child’s job to acknowledge his feelings and to tell us why he is doing what he is doing. And of course, like many of us, our children will discover different versions or explanations for themselves as they progress through life. So when a parent asks me the question: “Why is my child acting this way?” Sometimes I simply respond by saying, “I truly don't know. I have some good guesses, and we will explore the usual suspects, but, most importantly, we are going to help your child find the answer to that question himself.”