Single Parenting: About the Strong-Willed Child

    Although all children can be strong-willed on occasion, some children are much more intensely so, and more often so, than others. Strong-willed children are not different in kind from other children; they differ only in the degree to which need for self-determination rules their life. But degree makes an enormous difference. 

For most parents, occasional willfulness is tolerable, but continual willfulness can create a problem as it quickly gathers shaping power of its own. The more often a willful act achieves its objective, the more powerful the child’s willfulness becomes. What separates willful children from those who are not is how they manage not getting what they want. When children who are not generally willful don’t get what they want, they may feel sad, shrug off the disappointment, and then go on to something else. 

Willful children, however, tend to have a different response: telltale anger. The emotional hallmark of the willful child is getting angry when he doesn’t get what he wants. His intense desire turns his aspiration into an imperative, and an imperative into a condition. “I want to have” turns into “I must have” turns into “I should have,” and the result is anger when the willful child is denied what he now feels entitled to. 

The strong-willed child often believes: “If I want it, then I should get it. If I’m refused it, I should be given a good reason why. If I don’t want to do it, I shouldn’t have to. If I argue, then I should win.” Then, when any of these beliefs are violated, this outcome seems unjust, and so he or she gets angry because a condition of assumed entitlement has not been met. 

The parent’s job to help the willful child learn to disconnect “should” from “want,” to let go of the conditional view through which he sees the situation. So the parent says something like this: “I know when you want something very much it feels like you should be allowed to get it, but life isn’t like that. Wanting something very much doesn’t mean we should get it. Wanting just means there’s something we’d like to have or do, and maybe we’ll get some of it, and maybe we won’t. And if we don’t, we’ll still be okay.”