Parenting difficult children and adolescents

Parenting is generally conceived as a unidirectional construct in which parents arethought to be the direct or indirect cause of different child outcomes. Children whoexhibit problematic behavior, who display hurtful and uncaring behavior toward othersor who are aggressive or turn to delinquency when they reach adolescence are oftenviewed as the product of insufficient parental competence (i.e., nurture) in addition toinherited genetic predisposition (i.e., nature). Competent parental behavior, on the otherhand, counteracts the development of callous-unemotional traits and disruptive conductby promoting the internalization of prosocial and normative behavior. However, empiricalevidence consistently shows that the general behavioral patterns of parents and childrenbecome interdependent and mutually reinforcing during childhood. Parents withlow parental competence, who interact with temperamentally difficult children, consistentlycreate coercive exchanges that produce escalations in child oppositional andaggressive behavior, subsequently increasing the likelihood of continued harsh parentingstrategies. Therefore, early prevention and intervention programs must have a systemicapproach and target the parents, the children, and the interaction process itself. Ifthe cycle of harsh, negative, and confrontational interactions is not broken during earlychildhood, there is a risk that coercion settles as a baseline pattern of conduct for futurerelationships