When Kids Are Inflexible Tyrants

If everything has to be "just so" or else, parents actually need to invoke some chaos.

Dear Is My Kid the Asshole,

I have the most rigid child in the universe. When my son reads aloud and makes a mistake, he insists that he has to start reading all over from the beginning of the book. If I turn on the bath water when he said he wanted to turn it on, he refuses to take a bath entirely — even if I turn the water back off, drain the tub and tell him he can re-start it. If I put his sandwich on the wrong plate, it’s totally ruined and he demands I make an entirely new one. I feel like I’ve been locked in a mental prison and my totally irrational 5-year-old is holding the key. What do I do?!

Sincerely,

Stuck at Alcatraz

Dear Stuck at Alcatraz,

I would like to send you some Xanax, but I doubt they would make it past your guard. In all seriousness, though, I’m so sorry to hear of your struggles, because what you’re going through is really hard — but I promise you, your child is not the most rigid child in the universe. In fact, we went through something quite similar with our now 10-year-old, but I’m happy to report that he has since (mostly) grown out of it.

I suspect, actually, that many of you who are reading this have similar stories to share. When I called up child development specialist Claire Lerner, the author of the wonderful new book Why Is My Child In Charge?, she said she’s been seeing a ton of this kind of inflexible behavior recently. “There is this increasing reliance on routines and rituals,” she said, “but it's like next level — where their blankets have to unfolded in a very specific way, or their parents have to say goodnight to them in a very routinized way with the same tone, and it could take an hour for the child to decide that parents have gotten it right.”

It’s hell on the parents, and on the kids too.

But your kid isn’t being rigid to make your life miserable — they’re feeling out-of-control (perhaps because of shifting Covid rules or the back-to-school transition), and they’re using rigidity as a means to gain control back. Research has linked inflexibility with childhood anxiety — when kids feel overwhelmed and out of sorts, they create rules and routines that give them a sense of power and control again. That could mean requiring you to cut their sandwiches a certain way, demanding a specific bedtime routine, only wearing clothes that feel or look a certain way, starting over from scratch when they make tiny mistakes, etc. (This inflexibility is related to perfectionism, but not exactly the same thing, which is why I decided to separate out these issues. If you want to learn more about handling perfectionism, read my newsletter from six weeks ago.)

Often, the kids who are exceptionally rigid are those who are temperamentally more sensitive and emotionally reactive. They can be “intense kids by nature, and they have very clear and fixed ideas in their head of what they expect,” Lerner said — and when those needs aren’t met, they do not know how to cope, and they melt down.

But there’s good news: You don’t have to meet all your kid’s irrational demands. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Here are some strategies that might, slowly, help your child ease up.