Oppositional Defiant Disorder

For the record, I don't really believe in Oppositional Defiant Disorder. I think we over medicalize a lot of stuff. I'm just trying to say I knew telling my kids no resulted in "I immediately must try that." and I'm trying to communicate something in shorthand form.

That's the Footnote on a piece here called Decision Making Practice. Coincidentally, I recently tweaked a few minor things on a piece called Adolescence because I linked to it from elsewhere because it talks about hormonal stuff having social and emotional fallout and some of the drama of adolescence being "a stage" because of that.

I had completely forgotten how much that piece goes on about "and when your CHILD mentally develops adult executive function and analytical skills, all those lies that you told can come back to bite you."

One of my children has an over development sense of FAIRNESS and justice, BY GOD!!! He seems to have gotten those genes from my mother. 

In other words, he got them from ME. Because his father certainly doesn't have that. 

My kids somewhat recently dubbed their dad my "weasel in shining armor." He has his good points. A strong sense of justice is not one of them.

Their Daddy is what the Internet calls a narcissist or what my mother would have called a selfish person. 

Our kids got half their genes from each of us and the most difficult things about our kids are consistently a case of "Trait from mom plus trait from dad collide and go boom."

A trivial example:

My youngest talks slow, like his dad. When he gets excited about something -- whether in a positive way or negative way -- he talks faster like his mom.

He still has a speech impediment and as a small child had a lot of pronunciation challenges. He would get either happily excited or upset about something, start talking faster and become completely incomprehensible and this would lead to a meltdown.

In the case of him being all justice and fairness for all! Yeah, not exactly. 

He got on his high horse about JUSTICE when things didn't go his way or when he was a teenager and felt he saw systemic issues and people were clearly stupid. He didn't get on his high horse about FAIRNESS if he was getting some unfair advantage over his brother.

I was someone who would get on my high horse about it being wrong for me to get unfair advantages. That often bit me in the butt and contributed to people thinking I'm a martyr because most people will very happily accept errors in their favor or similar and not go "Actually, something went wrong there and that's not right."

I've worked at toning that down. I've been dirt poor for a lot of years and also become aware that trying to correct every instance of injustice is probably my mother's noble heritage talking.

It's socially problematic for some random person to get all up in arms over every stupid error. "Shit happens" and it's not always indicative of moral defect or systemic problems.

If you are in authority -- such as the local noble -- it's constructive to stop and examine every stupid small problem and wonder how that happened. If you are an Ordinary Joe, people just think you are being an ass if you habitually do that.

Social skills are mostly LEARNED. Humans are born incapable of walking while a lot of other mammals run around immediately after birth.

Our big brains drive everything and that includes having underdeveloped arms and legs at birth. So we have relatively long childhoods and complex societies and unlike, say, spiders, we don't have that much hard wired behavior. 

So I didn't look at this unfortunate combination in my child -- of JUSTICE streak, but only really when HE feels shafted because also selfish streak from daddy -- and conclude "He's messed up! He's pathological and unfixable! He's a BAD child!"

I looked at it and rolled my eyes and went "Oh, ugh, yet another mom's genes meet dad's genes and go boom. He needs to learn something here before he is an adult or this could go bad places."

So I would gently bust him on it by pointing out in a mild tone of voice "Yes, yes, big huge injustice. Funny how you didn't have a meltdown yesterday about injustice when the exact same thing happened but benefited you instead of your brother."

But I also was picky about doing right by my kids, so when he hit adolescence, there was no real reason for him to go ballistic about stuff. Thus the line that made everyone laugh of "Your problem is called TESTOSTERONE, not my bitch mother."

I was fortunate to be able to be a full-time homemaker and homeschooling mom and make raising my kids my primary job. I'm aware if you are a single parent or both parents must work to survive, it's harder to be picky about trying to get things right in a detailed way and I write in hopes of making it easier for other people to get it done in spite of having less time to devote to analyzing to death every stupid little problem like I learned to do from my mother and her noble heritage.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder is probably a situation where some kid has certain traits and the parents aren't handling it effectively. So the kid reacts strongly to perceived injustice or whatever and adults around them do things that tend to make this worse instead of better.

My oldest son spent his childhood immediately doing whatever I told him to not do to scientifically test if it worked the way I said it did. So I quickly changed my strategy for communicating with him about anything genuinely immediately dangerous to focus on helping him make informed safe decisions.

Probably a lot of parents respond to such behavior by getting even more controlling because they are concerned about the child hurting themselves and this makes the child even more determined to have their own way.

I made sure the battle was never about who is in control. 

Because I know they got those genes from me and I don't react well to people imagining I'm supposed to just do as I'm told because someone told me to.

If you are in authority and in the right and it's reasonable, cool, I will respect THAT. But if I think you are in the wrong or don't have the authority or it's a serious problem for me, I'm going to look for a way out of it and try to handle it nonconfrontationally etc.

People who get diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder probably are people who stopped making distinctions long ago and just react globally with "You can't tell me NO!" or "You can't MAKE me!"

I don't believe that's something they are simply born with. I think that's something they are born with that someone largely mishandled consistently for years.

Footnote 

See also "No" is not enough information.