"is something wrong with my child?"

It's frightening and painful to suspect that something is wrong with your child. When the cause of your worry is your child's misbehavior, especially toward you, it's confusing and exhausting, too. On the one hand, you believe that no one else your child's age acts like that ... but on the other, don't all kids disobey and challenge parental authority? Don't they all go through phases? Do you really have anything to be concerned about at all? You're probably losing sleep agonizing over questions like these. And that's the last thing you need if you usually spend your days battling with your child.

In this chapter, I hope to help you start rebuilding the strength you need to address the problems you're experiencing with your son or daughter, with the ultimate goal of restoring the precious relationship we all want and deserve to have with our children. Let's begin answering the question that's probably keeping you awake at night—"Is something wrong with my child?"—through a simple comparison. Do the following scenarios strike a familiar chord?

• "Jenny's a loving, affectionate girl, and her teachers say she's very bright, but ask her to do something she doesn't want to do and watch out. It's like she becomes a different child—loud, hostile, and downright nasty. The more I try to explain that whether she goes to bed on time, puts away her toys, or brushes her teeth is not up to her, the louder she shouts 'No!' at us. She just doesn't seem to get it."

• "Ben just can't behave anywhere. I've had to drag him out of toy stores and ended up in shouting matches over the candy he insists on having at the grocery store. I've gotten to the point where I do everything I can to stay home. I just don't have the energy to deal with crisis after crisis, day in and day out."

• "I can see that Josh is getting depressed, irritable, and withdrawn, but I just don't know what to do. I've tried to explain to him that of course no one wants to play with him when he's so bossy. He just can't have his own way all the time. When he was the only one on the block who wasn't invited to Billy's birthday party, it broke my heart."

• "I feel like I'm on one of those wheels they put in hamsters' cages, and I don't know how to get off. Annie talks back, and I yell. She yells back, and I yell louder. I threaten punishment, and she still doesn't obey. I get madder and madder until I either scare myself or get exhausted. That's when I start to back down, and before I know it I've wasted 20 minutes arguing with a 5-year-old without getting her to do what I've asked."

• "I was so thrown by Susie's calm refusal to do what she was told that I actually took her to the ear doctor for special tests. That she couldn't hear me was the only logical reason I could come up with for her ignoring me so often."

• "Frankie's always had a temper, always had a real mind of his own. We didn't worry too much about it when he was two—just shook our heads and told ourselves he'd outgrow it. But now we've watched all the other kids leave the 'terrible 2's' and move on, and at age 6 Frankie still throws tantrums every day, still grabs the other kids' toys, pushes and shoves to be first in line, and has to be literally wrestled into bed every night. How much longer is this going to last?"

The common thread running through these parental laments is defiance. Call it resistance, opposition, contrariness, disobedience, willfulness, irritability, sass, freshness, or any of a dozen other terms, it's the repeated failure of a child to follow rules, obey commands or comply with requests, and generally do what parents, teachers, peers, and society at large expect children to do. Defiant children frequently express anger or resentment more often than other kids. They may resist taking responsibility for their own actions, instead pointing a finger at others or even trying to "get even" for perceived offenses. Recognizing your child in one or more of the preceding descriptions may give you a little more to go on, but it still may not be enough to tell you whether something is wrong. Oppositional, defiant behavior can take a perplexing variety of forms, and parents define "misbehavior" in many different ways, depending on how they expect children to behave and how well they tolerate any behavior that falls outside those limits. Therefore, to answer the question "Is there really anything wrong, or is it just me?" you need some reliable objective measures. My colleagues and I consider a child oppositional and defiant when the child demonstrates a pattern of these three types of behavior:

1. The child fails to start doing what you ask within 1 minute after you make the request (or 1 minute following the point at which you say the child has to do what you ask, such as after the cartoon he is watching is over).

2. The child fails to finish what you've asked her to do. Some children may get up and start making their beds as requested right away, but then they run off to do something more appealing in the middle of the chore.

3. The child violates rules of conduct already taught. Does your son know that swearing is unacceptable in your house but do it anyway? Does your daughter understand the rule "no snacks without permission" but constantly take food from the refrigerator without asking? Noncompliant and defiant behavior is most likely to appear at home or in public, but your child may also be acting out at school, leaving his desk in class without permission or talking throughout a teacher's lecture.

One of the most problematic aspects of identifying defiant behavior in children, both for their parents and for psychologists, is that these three types of behavior can take so many forms and that they appear with widely varying degrees of aggression. Some kids, like Susie above, are pretty passive in their avoidance of requests and rules. Others, perhaps Jenny and Frankie, might express their defiance very vocally, even physically. Many parents report that their children shout and swear at them or even hit or push them when asked to do something they don't want to do. Oppositional, defiant behavior can run the gamut from whining, complaining, and crying to arguing, yelling, screaming, and swearing. It may range from simply drifting away from...