Is This Misbehavior—or a Missing Skill?
A practical guide to seeing your child’s behavior through age, stage, and maturity Parenting Series | Part 2 of 8
I wrote this especially for parents still raising children at home. But if you do not have children, or if your children are grown and making their own way now, there is still something here worth considering. All of us live with people whose behavior can be confusing, frustrating, immature, or hard to understand. And all of us have our own areas where growth is still under construction. This reflection is about child development, but it is also about learning to see people more carefully, respond with more patience, and ask better questions before assuming the worst. Sometimes what looks like stubbornness is fear. Sometimes what looks like laziness is disorganization. Sometimes what looks like defiance is an undeveloped skill that still needs practice, support, and time.
Most parents have had a moment when their child’s behavior made them feel embarrassed in public, confused in private, and quietly unsure whether they knew what they were doing at all: Why is my child acting like this?
It may happen in the grocery store when a four-year-old collapses over a denied box of cereal. It may happen at the kitchen table when an eight-year-old stares at a math worksheet as if it were written in ancient Greek. It may happen when a teenager responds to a simple question with a one-word answer that somehow manages to sound tired, annoyed, and offended all at once. The parent feels the heat rise in his chest and starts building the case in his mind: She is being disrespectful. He is being lazy. They know better. This is defiance.
Sometimes that is true. Children can be defiant. They can be selfish, rude, dishonest, impulsive, and stubborn. Any parent who has lived with children longer than eleven minutes knows this. Children are wonderful, but they are not naturally mature. They arrive in the world with strong wants, loud feelings, limited self-control, and a remarkable ability to believe the universe should reorganize itself around their preferences.
The behavior may need correction. But first it needs to be understood: Is this child being rebellious, or is this child acting like a child at this stage of development?
