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Key points
- People often think of children as throwing tantrums or showing distress as a way to manipulate adults.
- This mischaracterizes the way that they think and the things that they need.
- Children melt down for different reasons and we need to look for internal mechanisms. It’s not about us.
- It’s difficult enough to regulate our own emotions as adults; children need our help.
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Billy, a 6-year-old boy whom I met many years ago during a school consultation, sobbed in the nurse’s office. His fists were balled up and his eyes were red and swollen. There had been an incident. He didn’t want to stop using a laptop and, after multiple attempts to get him to stop, it was taken from him and he melted down. He threw the laptop to the ground, then kicked and screamed when he was held, and eventually scratched and punched the staff trying to contain him.
The assessment from the team was unanimous—Billy was manipulating them to get what he wanted. He was doing this at home as well. What could be done to get him to do what he is told?
The typical solutions came up, including detention, suspension, loss of the laptop, or tweaking his reward/reinforcer plan at school and home. These solutions were all about convincing Billy—motivating him —to follow instructions and not manipulate the adults to get what he wants.
Yet all of these solutions had been tried before, and things weren’t getting better. Billy continued to resist most instructions and transitions, often getting angry and sometimes melting down like today. While the solutions were getting tweaked and adjusted, the underlying explanation for Billy’s behaviors did not change.
Billy’s story represents countless consultations and evaluations I have done over the years, and my first question is always: What if “manipulating others” isn’t the right explanation for this child’s difficulties? If we have the wrong explanation, we will have the wrong solutions.
Labeling a child as "manipulative" implies that the child is doing this on purpose and that it’s a problem between the child and the adult. But the problem for Billy and similar children isn’t actually about someone else—it’s about their own brain and body, their own neural circuitry.
The externally seen behaviors—such as refusals and agitation—are external expressions of a child’s internal distress which can spiral into an emotional hijacking of their brain. Children aren’t controlling these behavioral responses or directing them at anyone. Massive meltdowns are the last stage of a child becoming increasingly out of control internally. They aren’t about anyone else.
Consider the idea that being able to follow directions is a developmental process similar to motor skills or speech and language. A toddler needs more support to follow directions than a kindergartener who, in turn, needs more supports and prompting than a sixth grader.
And within each age group—say a room full of kids born on the same day of the same year—you will see a wide spectrum of abilities in this area. Most kids will land somewhere along expected responses, some will meet demands more easily than many of their peers, and some will have a harder time, struggling more to follow directions than many of their peers.
These children aren’t choosing to have a harder time. They are struggling to get it right. And it can be for a wide range of reasons, including some psychiatric diagnoses, atypical neurodevelopmental trajectories, or many other potential causes such as sleep disorders, trauma, physical illness, and many more. Some kids will appear temporarily in the slower-to-respond group because the cause is more transient—such as being sick or tired—and some will have more persistent patterns.
When we blame the child, labeling their difficulties as "manipulative" and responding in kind, we miss the mark. But when we see them as struggling to meet the demand, we can start to develop solutions that target the actual problem.
We might try giving the child more time and space to meet the demand. Or we might modify the task. Or we might take away the demand, at least temporarily. The child’s ability or inability to meet our expectations starts with their capacity to meet those expectations. If we keep escalating the energy of the demand, without adjusting it to their needs, or if we blame them for something they can’t change, we light up the child’s emotional circuits, making it even harder for them to meet our demand, and sometimes unraveling their emotional control completely.
“Manipulative” is a pejorative term that often blames the child in situations that the child actually has little to no control over. If we scratch that word from our automatic explanation list and look into other possible mechanisms for their difficulties, we can build more successful interventions.
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