Why expecting obedience actually makes parenting HARDER

By Sally Prebble, PhD.

The idea of obedience continues to be the holy grail of parenting; the idea that if we could just learn the right phrase, or hold the right inner attitude of authority, or bring in the right consequences, or sticker chart, or time out protocol, then our resistant child will magically bend their knee and start doing whatever we instruct.

The pressure to pursue this path starts really early, with newborn sleep training programmes, and shopkeepers expecting toddlers with only a few words in their vocabulary to say “please” and “thank you”.

Many of us have just absorbed the idea from our own childhoods, our mothers in law, schools and 1980s sitcoms that good children should obey us and that this compliance is what defines our competence as parents. 

Good parent = Obedient Child

Unfortunately, this assumption is not just an idea that floats around in our heads tormenting us, it is absolutely woven into the very fabric of our society.

There are many expectations on our children these days: show up places on time, dressed in a particular way, being quiet in most public places, sitting still a lot of the time, not touching things they are surrounded by, not running at the pool, not climbing on the statues, not shouting in the library, not putting things in their mouths or up their noses….

As parents, we are well aware that it is WE who are expected to enforce these social rules. There is this enormous pressure we are under as parents to make sure that our children comply with these social rules - whether or not we personally agree with them.

I want to share five reasons why you might want to reconsider this myth of obedience; reasons why pursuing obedience as a goal actually makes it less likely that your child will want to do what you say.

(If you prefer to watch, you can see the video I've made on this topic here.)

 1. Children = Human

Firstly, our children are human beings (smaller, but still human) and human beings really value things like autonomy and choice.  

The uncomfortable truth that all parents come up against at some point is that even though society expects us to maintain obedience with our children, our children haven’t signed on to this social contract. 

What we actually mean by obedience is getting a child to do something that they don’t want to do. In fact, we often celebrate the moral virtue of the idea that children should learn to do things they don’t want to do. 

Just think for a moment about the language we use to describe children who are not behaving in line with our social expectations - we call them 

• Wilful (i.e. they have their own will, their own wants, needs and wishes)
• Rebellious (i.e. they are rebelling against ideas or rules that don’t align with their wishes or values)
• Defiant (i.e. they are defying force that is used against them)
• Oppositional (i.e. they are opposing rules and expectation that don’t align with their wishes)

What we are really aiming for when we expect obedience from our children is a child who will easily give up on their own wishes, wants and values in favour of ours. We are wanting them to lose their will, their spirit, their inner compass and follow ours unquestioningly. 

What we are actually doing when we put a child in this position is to give them two options - give up, or fight back. 

If you have a child in the”fight back” category, you will know about it immediately. If they are in the “give up” category, the pain of this might not be evident until later in life. What tends to happen over time is that children who have not experienced autonomy and choice in their childhoods then find it later, as teens or adults, by distancing themselves markedly from their parents.¹ 

Which brings to the second point. Let’s say (for argument’s sake) we accept that obedience is our goal. How might we go about this? 

2. Obedience = Force 

Humans have been experimenting with obedience for some time now. The only way people have discovered to consistently and effectively make other people do what they want every time is through force. 

And what our extensive experiments of the past couple of millennia have shown us about this style of parenting is that this force needs to escalate over time in order to maintain obedience.² 

This is the weird bind we are in as modern parents: the tools of this ‘obedience-based’ parenting have largely been removed from us (and thank goodness). As a society, we have decided that harming children is something we no longer have the stomach for. 

But the expectation of immediate, unquestioning submission from our children is still very much alive.

As a result, teachers and parents are still expected to maintain Victorian levels of compliance but using modern, gentle techniques. This is why parents are largely ridiculed these days - because it’s impossible!

What has crept in to replace this physical force is emotional force: shouting, scaring, withdrawing love and affection. 

What I see in the families I work with is that either families get deeper and deeper into scaring and forcing their children (leaving parents feeling guilty and distressed), or they periodically give up, shifting into permissiveness.

This is why obedience (or authoritarian parenting) and permissiveness are actually two sides of the same coin. One creates the conditions for the other. Those who try to sustain obedience often end up giving up (for instance by having a tightly controlled week and then a weekend “free for all”). This is quit jarring and uncertain for children. 

3. Mindless compliance

A relationship based on obedience tends to lead to unforeseen and unintended consequences, like whole populations who are unable to think critically or make sound ethical decisions.

If you have read this far, I imagine you are a person who would quite like your child to be able to think for themselves, to develop careful moral reasoning and empathy to be able to think critically and question what they hear and read and see. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to think of the potential pitfalls of training a child to do anything an adult asks them to do, unthinkingly. History is littered with the tragic and unforeseen consequences of this.

By expecting obedience, we are expecting a child to relegate some of their thinking, and stop thinking for themselves some of the time. Which unfortunately also makes it more likely they will not think well for themselves when they are in a party being offered drugs, or in a relationship being pressured to do things or go places they don’t want to.

If we want our children to be able to think for themselves, we need to give them opportunities to think and reason and develop their own moral compass.³

4. Harm to Connection

We know from research that connection with our children is incredibly important for their development,⁴ for their mental health,⁵ their learning,⁶ their healthy loving relationships as adults,⁷ their brain development,⁸ and so on.

It is incredibly challenging to form this depth of connection when we are expecting obedience from our children, because this introduces shame, guilt, and conditional love. We sometimes end up oscillating between seeking closeness and affection and forcing our children. It’s uncomfortable and confusing for them and us.  It places strain on this precious connection.

The tragedy is, children follow the person they are attached to literally, and also in terms of their choices, their decisions, their likes and dislikes.⁹

If you create distance in your relationship by forcing obedience, you are ironically making it less likely that they will want to do the things you ask. It is eroding our actual power - the evolutionary power of connection.

5. We care about why they do things

There are all sorts of things that we want our children to do:

We want them to do their homework.

We want them to give their brother a turn with the toy.

We want them to stop hitting other children in the park

We want them to help out with the dishes

But notice: we don’t just want them to do these things mindlessly, because we forced them to. We want them to do it because they are learning some inner motivation to do it. That they can see the ‘why’.

So we don’t just want them to do homework, we want them to grow into the kind of person that values learning.

I can certainly bribe or force my child to share their toys; but has this taught them to value other humans, or just that force is a good way to get what you want?

The uncomfortable and research-based truth is that children don’t learn kindness, compassion, consideration, respect, responsibility and care through being forced to obey our rules. They develop these capacities slowly and gradually over time, in the context of loving, caring relationships.¹⁰

If we have an expectation of obedience, the whole way we relate t o our children makes it less likely that they will cooperate with us.¹¹

Once we give up on pursuing obedience as our goal, we can actually start to relate to our children in ways that make it much more likely that they will want to do these things, and over time, start to develop the capacity to act in ways that are cooperative, empathic, kind, considerate, compassionate and so on. 

If not obedience, then what??

If you are reading this and worrying, “...but if not obedience, then what am I supposed to do?” I want you to rest assured. There are, in fact, many things that we can do as parents to make it more likely that our children will be willing to hear us, to want to cooperate, to want to do what we say. 

Which is nice.

It makes our lives a whole lot easier.

If you want to know more about this, I have a video resource exploring how we can do this that you can see here.

Research referred to in this article:

¹ Leondari A and Kiosseoglou G., Parental psychological control and attachment in late adolescents and young adults. Psychol Rep. June 2002; 90 (3 Pt 1):1015-30. doi: 10.2466/pr0.2002.90.3.1015. PMID: 12090493.

² Gershoff ET, Goodman GS, Miller-Perrin CL, Holden GW, Jackson Y, Kazdin AE. The strength of the causal evidence against physical punishment of children and its implications for parents, psychologists, and policymakers. Am Psychol. 2018 Jul-Aug; 73(5):626-638. doi: 10.1037/amp0000327. PMID: 29999352; PMCID: PMC8194004.

³ Pinquart M, Fischer A. Associations of parenting styles with moral reasoning in children and adolescents: A meta-analysis. Journal of Moral Education,  2021 June. 

⁴ Groh AM, Fearon RP, Bakermans-Kranenburg MJ, van Ijzendoorn MH, Steele RD, Roisman GI. The significance of attachment security for children's social competence with peers: a meta-analytic study. Attach Hum Dev. 2014;16(2):103-36; 

⁵ Zhang X, Li J, Xie F, Chen X, Xu W, Hudson NW. The relationship between adult attachment and mental health: A meta-analysis. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2022 Nov;123(5):1089-1137. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000437. PMID: 36201836.

⁶ Deneault A et al., Does child-mother attachment predict and mediate language and cognitive outcomes? A series of meta-analyses, Developmental Review, v 70, 2023;

⁷ Fraley C, Attachment in Adulthood: Recent Developments, Emerging Debates, and Future Directions, Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 70:401-422, Jan 2019. 

⁸ Élizabel L  et. al., Attachment Security in Infancy: A Preliminary Study of Prospective Links to Brain Morphometry in Late Childhood, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 8, 2017.

⁹ Kochanska G, Woodard J, Kim S, Koenig JL, Yoon JE, Barry RA. Positive socialization mechanisms in secure and insecure parent-child dyads: two longitudinal studies. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2010 Sep;51(9):998-1009. 

¹⁰ Xu X, Liu Z, Gong S, Wu Y. The Relationship between Empathy and Attachment in Children and Adolescents: Three-Level Meta-Analyses. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jan 26;19(3):1391. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19031391. PMID: 35162410; PMCID: PMC8835466.

¹¹ Goagoses, N., Bolz, T., Eilts, J. et al. Parenting dimensions/styles and emotion dysregulation in childhood and adolescence: a systematic review and Meta-analysis. Curr Psychol 42, 18798–18822 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03037-7