If your child seems to argue with everything, refuses simple requests, pushes every boundary, and somehow turns “Please put your shoes on” into a 20-minute battle, you may be wondering:
“What am I supposed to do with a child like this?”
Here’s my unpopular opinion based on what I learned from my wife Shelly:
Stop trying to win the battle. Start trying to understand the pattern.
After raising six kids, Shelly taught me something that changed the way I looked at strong-willed kids. Defiance doesn’t always mean that your child needs punishment. Sometimes it’s a signal that something about the situation, the expectation, the timing, or the way we’re responding needs to be understood a little deeper.
The American Academy of Pediatrics makes a similar distinction: discipline is supposed to teach, not simply punish, and recommends calm limits, consistency, positive reinforcement, and understanding what is happening before and after challenging behavior.
Who is really… triggered?
Imagine this:
You tell your daughter, “It’s time to get ready for school.” She says, “No.”
You repeat yourself. She says, “I said NO!”
You get louder. She gets louder. Now neither of you is really talking about getting ready for school anymore. You’re fighting for control.
This is where many parents make a typical mistake. They respond to the behavior without understanding the situation that caused it.
Shelly taught me to look at parenting differently.
Instead of asking only… “How do I make my child stop doing this?” She taught me to start asking, “What is actually happening here? And what do I want my kid to learn?”
That small re-think can completely change your next move.
Don’t Freak Out
This is especially important with strong-willed kids.
When your child’s behavior pushes your buttons, your brain wants an immediate resolution. You want to fix it now. But your first job isn’t necessarily to change your child.
It may be to manage your response.
Because if your child pushes your button and you immediately explode, you’ve just taught your child that THEIR behavior can control YOUR behavior. I know, I know. Scary, right?
That’s not modeling or showing kids how to act. That’s simply reacting… and not very productive… for either of you.
One of the principles Shelly developed was designed specifically to help parents “interrupt” that reaction long enough to make a better decision. She named it… “Don’t Freak Out.”
I’m not going to give you the entire strategy here… but that’s one of the tools I walk through in The Shelly Method… but the idea is simple to understand.
Create enough distance between the trigger and your response that you can parent… INTENTIONALLY… instead of EMOTIONALLY.
YOUR Defiant Child… needs a customized map.
Here’s another mistake I see parents make…
They find a parenting technique that worked for somebody else’s child and assume it should work for theirs. But strong-willed kids ARE NOT interchangeable. What works beautifully for one child may make another child dig in twice as hard. We’ve seen that in OUR family.
That’s why The Shelly Method doesn’t begin with a giant list of tactics, punishments and rewards.
It teaches parents how to study their individual child, identify patterns, determine the outcome they actually want, and then build a strategy around that child.
You know… like creating… “a customized map.”
You don’t yell at your GPS because it doesn’t know where you’re going. You give it better information.
Your child may be giving you information, too. The question is whether you know how to read it.
Either way… you have to “choose YOUR hard.”
Shelly had a phrase I loved. Can you guess what it was. Yep… “CHOOSE YOUR HARD!”
Because parenting kids is going to be hard. That’s a given.
You can choose the hard of constantly fighting, yelling, threatening, repeating yourself and feeling defeated… Or…
you can choose the hard of learning your child, preparing differently, controlling your own reactions and intentionally teaching them how to navigate difficult situations.
Neither road is easy. But one of them builds the family you’re trying to create. And that’s ultimately what The Shelly Method is about.
NOT creating perfectly obedient children. NOT becoming a perfect mom. And certainly NOT eliminating every difficult moment.
It’s about giving you a way to understand your strong-willed child, make better decisions in the moments that matter, and build a family culture where discipline can actually teach instead of simply punish.
If you’re exhausted from wondering, “Why won’t my child just listen?”, I wrote The Shelly Method for you.
It’s the beginning of a much bigger conversation about raising strong-willed kids in a spirit of love… without losing yourself in the process.
Check it out here -> www.shellymethod.com
Leave a Reply