A Hard-Line Approach to the Problem Child

“My 12-year-old son has been in charge for the past year,” the 40-year-old woman said in a weary voice that made her sound much older. “I need to reestablish control.”

The woman and 25 other parents, teachers and counselors gathered last Saturday at UC Irvine for a daylong workshop titled “Achieving Behavioral Change in Children: Getting Children to Do What You Want Them to Do.” The workshop was conducted by Dr. Paul E. Wood, a Huntington Beach psychiatrist who specializes in childhood misbehavior.

Drawing on his experience in treating 5,000 families during the past 15 years, Wood, who is also an adjunct psychiatry professor at UCI, has written extensively on the subject, including the 1977 book “How to Get Your Children to Do What You Want Them to Do.”

A self-described “radical psychiatrist,” the 44-year-old Wood preaches a philosophy of strong discipline for misbehaving children of all ages--by giving or withholding privileges and rewards--that some parents find unpalatable. Indeed, four parents walked out of the workshop because they found Wood’s disciplinary methods so harsh.

But most stayed, including a father who said his 14-year-old son is “basically a good kid, but he’s not getting good grades, and he’s not doing things very positively. It’s been suggested to me that my son wants to fail and that I should let him. But I can’t stand it.”

Observed Wood: “You’re right, and they’re wrong. A parent has a responsibility to make his children successful, even if the children are miserable in their success. This is the best way to show that you love your children. What you are saying to them is that they are capable of being a success, and you’re going to make them be a success. Then, kids will feel cared about.”

If parents don’t believe that their children are capable of being successful human beings, then they are dooming themselves and their children to a miserable existence, said Wood, who is the father of two teen-age children.

Stopping a child’s misbehavior poses problems for parents uninformed about parenting techniques, Wood said, because for “problem” children it makes no difference whether they are being hugged or being spanked as long as they are the center of their parents’ attention.

And, parents who think misbehavior will cease if it is ignored will find that the level of misbehavior increases as the child seeks to regain the undivided attention of his or her parents, Wood said.

Other behavior modification techniques currently in vogue, such as Parent Effectiveness Training (PET), which encourages parents to listen more to their children and work out solutions, are dismissed by Wood as “a waste of time.” He argues that these techniques are flawed because they are based on studies that failed to examine a true cross section of both “difficult” and well-behaved children.

In sharp disagreement with Wood is Lee Hachey, a Newport Beach marriage, family and child counselor and PET exponent. “The problem with his approach is that in the short term it works for a lot of parents who are very authoritarian,” Hachey said in a telephone interview. “But in the long term, though the children may behave, they’re not allowed to develop into self-responsible individuals because they’re constantly being told what to do.”

Hachey, who is co-director of the 12-person Newport Harbor Counseling Center, said Wood’s approach does not work at all for children over age 10 because “their parents can’t scare them anymore.” Indeed, Hachey said young children who have been raised under strict regimens like Wood’s when they become adolescents “all of a sudden exhibit a gross amount of rebellion. They skip school, start ‘mouthing back’ and refuse to obey their parents.”

Yet Wood insisted: “The only thing that works is to demand that your child behave and make it worth his while.” Thus, as a first step for reestablishing control of a misbehaving child of any age under Wood’s regimen, the child is deprived of all possessions and privileges, which are returned to the child on a piecemeal basis as rewards for good behavior.

“Strip the kid’s room of everything except his bed,” Wood advised his startled audience, who had paid $72 each for the workshop. “Take his wall posters, his TV, his stereo and all his clothes, except for one outfit. Ask him which outfit he hates the most and make sure you give him that one.”

The only things the child will get for free, Wood says, are schoolbooks and three meals a day, which when he’s home must be eaten in his room. Everything else will have to be earned through a system under which children are rewarded for good behavior with points that can be used to reacquire clothes, TVs and stereos. Misbehavior will cause the child to lose points--and possessions or privileges, such as being able to visit friends.

Explaining why parents should allow a problem child to have the necessities of life for free, Wood said: “I have a strong conviction that you should never lie to a child. If you told the child that he would have to earn his food, you are actually telling him that you would allow him to die from starvation if he continues to misbehave. This is unacceptable because some children would die. And it’s against the law. The law says that you must feed, clothe, house and educate your child. But beyond this, you have no responsibility to provide him with anything else.”

Parents today, in Wood’s view, are so affluent that as a practical matter they end up giving their children a plethora of possessions regardless of behavior--in effect rewarding misbehavior. “If you get something for nothing,” asked Wood, “what’s the motivation to act right?”

Changing a child’s behavior will require parental steadfastness, even for such mundane tasks as taking out the garbage. “Under my system you’re going to have to act like you mean everything you say and do,” Wood said. “If you want your kid to take out the trash now , you should tell him to do so with the TV off--and make sure you have eye contact with him.

“The reaction you’re going to get from your strapping 17-year-old is: ‘Huh? you turned off the TV, Ma.’ If he doesn’t immediately move when you ask him to take out the trash--and he probably won’t--lift him up by the arms without saying another word. Stand behind him, put your hands over his hands as he picks up the garbage can and do the ‘trash can boogie’ (in which the parent physically steers the youth) out to the curb. Thank him profusely for taking out the trash and give him $5.

“Wait until next trash day, and you’ll find he’ll take the trash out like a white tornado. Tell him ‘thank you’ and shake his hand. When he asks you where’s the $5 for taking out the trash, you tell him that it’s like Las Vegas: You never know when you’ll get paid off. That’s why people keep going back.”

Handcuffed Her Son

By the same token, Wood said, parents should force their children to go to school, even if it means escorting them there and sitting next to them in class every day. At Wood’s suggestion, one woman whose 17-year-old son had been a truant for nine months did this, but at midday he went to the restroom and escaped out a window, Wood recalled.

The next day the woman again escorted her son to school, and as they sat down for the first class of the day, she handcuffed him to her. Looking at her shocked son, she uttered her first words to him in nearly 24 hours: “If you need to go to the restroom, I’ll be coming with you. Whether it’s the men’s room or the ladies’ room makes no difference to me.”

For two days mother and son attended school in handcuffs as fellow students stared in stunned disbelief. “If that loser’s mother’s doing this, just think what my mom would do to me,” one student was overheard telling another as they walked down a school hallway.

At the end of three days, the teen-ager said it was no longer necessary for his mother to escort him to school. “I never believed you cared enough about me to do what you did,” the youth told his mother. He went on to finish high school, Wood said, and is now attending college.

“This takes a lot of guts,” Wood said, explaining that the parents of some of his patients sometimes have to be their child’s shadow 24 hours a day to bring about behavioral change. “You’ve got to believe in yourself and your kid.”

Lee Hachey, who not only has taught PET techniques for the past dozen years but also has heard Wood lecture, said that PET is superior to Wood’s approach. “The democratic approach to raising children is actually easier for parents. I know this approach is difficult at first for parents because they weren’t raised that way, and it takes diligence for them to properly learn these parenting skills. But it’s worth the effort because PET teaches children to think for themselves and why they’ve got to live by the rules. Children who cooperate with their parents, rather than just obeying them, are easier to handle, especially in their teens.”

Wood’s method, on the other hand, is based on his view of the proper role parents and children should play in a household.

“A lot of parents like to think that children are small adults,” Wood said. “They are not. They are children.”

Because children are not born with the internal strength and control associated with adulthood, they must be given the time--and direction--that will allow them to develop gradually until they adopt the mature behavior associated with adulthood, Wood said.

So in Wood’s view, parents are authority figures who should always be obeyed by their children. Parents and children are neither equals nor friends.

“A kid stops being a kid when he moves out, and you no longer support him,” explained Wood, who said the ages of the children he has treated has ranged from 18 months to 36 years.

“Childhood is not about the number of years you’ve lived on this planet. It’s about dependency. Childhood has nothing to do with age because there are a lot of people between the ages of 18 and 40 who are still children, and the age of children is getting older.

“Have you noticed how many children over 18 are living at home today? The children say they’re living with their parents because it’s too expensive for them to live out on their own. But the truth is that they’re still children who are dependent on their parents to take care of them. Kids today barely know how to tie their shoes.”

Yet, children misbehave and never grow into mature adults not merely because their parents are permissive, Wood maintained, but also because parents often have abdicated their responsibility to properly care for their children.

“Childhood is a time when people are supposed to be totally dependent on their parents to care for them,” Wood said. “If children learn that their parents can be counted on, can be depended on, then they develop a sense of trust in their parents so that when the child is about about 7 or 10 he can start becoming more autonomous. If children can’t develop trust in their parents, how do you expect them to develop faith in anything, especially faith in themselves that they can go out in the world and make it on their own?”

Wood’s method of behavior modification of children is based on a couple of basic assumptions. “Parents are the most capable people to change a child’s behavior,” Wood said. “They can undermine the influence of schools, courts and peers.

“This power comes from the basic bonding experience between parent and child,” Wood explained. “Parents are the source of life and survival for children. Children learn as infants that this person (parent) can make or break him. Little kids know that you can cause their death.”

While children intuitively know that parents are potentially powerful, Wood cautioned: “You cannot fool kids. Don’t ever lie to kids because they have an incredible ability to sense out a parent’s true feelings; they’re psychic.”

Because children are amazingly good at analyzing their parents’ strengths and weaknesses, parents who feel insecure in their authority role are quickly found out by their children, who Wood says will take advantage of the parents’ weaknesses.

To the surprise of some of the teachers in attendance, Wood maintained that teachers rank second only to parents in having the power to influence the behavior of children because of the amount of time they spend with them.

And in a veiled criticism of parents, Wood argued: “The power of a peer group to influence the behavior of a child is directly proportional to how weak his or her parents are. A child will get what he needs. If his parents are not providing the kid with this, he will look elsewhere.”

Wood noted that punk rockers on the surface seem to be nothing more than a group of teen-agers who have banded together to flout social convention. But, he said, the punk rock milieu serves as a substitute for the parenting its aficionados feel they are not receiving at home.

“Punk rockers are told what to wear, how many holes to pierce their bodies with and what music to listen to,” Wood said. “Clearly, punk rockers are not looking for independence. From the behavior they adopt to ‘fit in,’ it’s obvious that they’re looking for the structure and control that their own parents aren’t providing. I’ve never seen a child attracted to groups like this who has a strong parent providing control.”

No Hopeless Cases

But all too many parents are reluctant to exercise authority over their children, Wood said, because they have listened too much to psychologists and psychiatrists.

“I don’t believe in mental illness in children, with the exception of schizophrenia and autism, which have biochemical causes,” Wood told the startled audience, explaining why he rarely finds it necessary to see a child and his parents more than three times. “Everything else is misbehavior. That’s where I have a tremendous advantage over other therapists. To me there are no hopeless cases involving children incapable of behaving themselves.”

However, Wood said he believes that there are genetic differences between children, even among siblings, that affect behavior. This explains why some children are “easy” to handle while others are “difficult or problem children,” Wood said.

Although the parents of the 10% of the youngsters who are considered “problem children” may find it difficult to believe, Wood argued that they are actually a blessing in disguise.

“You don’t get a problem child unless you need one,” Wood said as the audience gasped. “It’s true. All you have to do is to look at the parents of problem children. They’re nice people.”

“Since you’re all nice people, you know that’s a real disadvantage,” Wood said as he surveyed his audience. “People will walk all over you.”

‘Hard-Line’ Approach

No where is this more evident than in situations where parents are “so nice that they can’t bring themselves to get into the hard-line stuff,” Wood said. “They want a loving, kind, friendly relationship with their child in which there’s lots of hugging, going on picnics and going out to the movies--the way family life is supposed to be according to the movies.”

But in order to regain control of their problem children, these parents must cast aside their naive view of the world, Wood said.

“There is no better lesson on how to get your act together and to add structure to your own life than by having a problem child,” he said.

“Your kids are not bad, crazy or some terrible curse put upon you from some previous lifetime. Kids are an opportunity for you to learn and grow. When your kid is driving you up the wall, you ought to thank God for giving you this learning experience.

“But if you say to yourself, ‘I’ve been good all my life, and this is what I get,’ then you’re going to get angry and do things that are negative for both you and your child.”