I studied this book as my primary source in preparing and writing my second crime/mystery book. That’s one of the reasons why I mostly substituted the word ‘child’ for ‘challenging’. The other reason is that I try to apply the context of the book to retarded adults rather than defiant children. Retarded adults are kids anyway, right?
In addition to so many children around me showing signs of becoming sociopaths, there are more adults acting like children. Many defiant children become adult psychopaths or sociopaths and then some become serial killers. I will use the revised book to explain why and how the criminal became a sociopath in my book.
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The whole family can lose affection for each other. Parents blame each other for the defiant’s destructive behavior. The siblings may end up being hostile towards the parents and the defiant sibling. This is how a defiant can bring down the whole family.
Important facts to remember
The defiant’s behavior is up to you. Because? Because the greatest potential to control the behavior of the challenger is in the environment and the huge part of the environment is YOU.
The challenger acts the way he does because he can’t see things the way you do, that is, difference in perspective.
The quickest way to determine why the challenger is acting the way they are is to look at yourself. Can you see the defiant attitude in yourself? If so, you are the problem or the root of it.
You encourage bad behavior to get worse when you show that you have a breaking point and use cumulative punishment. Eventually you lose your patience and decide to punish or give in and temporarily reward the challenging behavior, thus creating a time bomb: the inevitable physical violence.
Suddenly overreacting to a certain challenger’s behavior will prevent the challenger from learning specific consequences for specific types of misbehavior. The challenger cannot build a predictable framework of action and reaction without that learning. Offer incentives like ‘reward points’ instead of using punishment.
What I think the book missed is emphasizing the fact that failure is not bad. In fact, failing is really good because we can’t learn until we fail. I didn’t just miss my childhood. It was also a disaster because my father was a perfectionist. Guess how that affected me. Yes. He never taught me that failure is good, but forced me to be ‘perfect’.
Remember, this is only a fraction of what I learned from the book.