Why and How to Be a Less Controlling Parent
Everything Is Under Control
Now that we know what autonomy-supportive parenting is, why we want to practice it (our kids’ self-sufficiency is better for them and us!), and how to “do” autonomy-supportive parenting, we need to face its biggest threat: our control issues.
Like when you are rushing to get to a Saturday morning activity on time and your child refuses to get dressed ten minutes before departure, declaring “I’m not going” even though they were excited about it just yesterday . . . I (I mean, you) might become controlling: “If you don’t get dressed and get in the car this minute, no Roblox and you pay us for the class with your allowance!”
Let’s be honest, it can be so much easier in many moments to be controlling. When I’m stressed, the kids are acting up, and we have a time crunch, I’m controlling: “Get your shoes on now! If you don’t start listening, we aren’t doing anything fun today!” (Controlling language, yelling, threatening.) I totally get it, and it’s going to happen to the best-intentioned of us.
Yet, in researching and living autonomy-supportive parenting as a practice, I became committed to the cause of decreasing how often I resort to controlling (which is often reactive anyways!), and increasing autonomy-supportive practices the best I can each day. Evidence and personal experience convince me it’s worth the extra time, energy, and effort.
The Role of Control
As we dive into controlling parenting as the biggest threat to autonomy-supportive parenting, examples of controlling range from these run of the mill control issues (like yelling demands to get shoes on feet) to more extreme, such as using shame and guilt to control behaviors.
In the last 30 years or so, parenting research consistently defines controlling parenting as including these core features:
Inducing guilt — “You’re making me yell.”
Contingent love — Shower a child with praise and attention when they ace a test. Withdraw attention and closeness when they fail a test.
Instilling shame — “What’s wrong with you?”
Invalidating — “My house, my rules, no discussion!”
In addition to these defining features, research on controlling parenting includes the use of threats, punishment, coercive rewards, and directive and demanding language. Not surprisingly, these controlling approaches as a whole lead to long-term negative outcomes such as lower self-esteem, depression and anxiety, worse academics, weaker social skills, more oppositional behaviors, and emotional self-regulation problems.
Let’s start with some self-reflection: how do you act when you feel controlled? I’m sure you have the experience, if not in your childhood at home or school, then in the workplace – maybe even a romantic partnership. When have you felt like you don’t have a choice, what you think doesn’t matter, and your actions are serving someone else’s priorities or agenda? And what does that do to your internal motivation to learn and perform, or be close and connected? How does it affect your general satisfaction with your relationships and/or your job?
A wealth of evidence supports what you may relate to: when we feel controlled, we have less internal motivation, and our enjoyment and satisfaction plummet.
What Does Controlling Really Mean?
Parenting presents a control dilemma: our children are other people, so by definition outside of our control, and parenting influences our children. So, how do we accept our responsibility to be actively involved in raising our children while trying not to control them? I have read and translated hundreds of pages down to several take-home points for understanding this specter of control looming across parenting.
First and foremost, the parent’s intention matters less than the child’s experience: research consistently finds the child’s perception of controlling or autonomy support as the most influential on a child’s outcomes. But, what is controlling? The research on controlling parenting distinguishes between two types of control: psychological and behavioral. Each type affects how children are motivated, externally or internally, in turn influencing how autonomous they feel. Told you – dense and complicated! Hang in there as we get to why it matters in everyday parenting life.
“The bottom line is if we want to raise children who feel autonomous in the world – a strong sense of self and self-worth, living by their values – we need to be less controlling.”
Psychologically Controlling
Psychologically controlling responses such as using guilt, shame, and love withdrawal, qualify as attempts to control a child’s psychological experience (eg, feelings, aspirations, and identity). Fundamentally non-responsive to a child’s emotional needs, this way of parenting feels like pressure and violates a child’s autonomy, all of which leads to greater anxiety and depression, as well as behavior problems.
Under the umbrella of psychologically controlling, internal control refers to a child being internally motivated to engage in a behavior either to gain a sense of self-worth or feeling of importance, or to avoid guilt and shame. A child experiencing internal control by their parent is more likely to feel rejected and resent their parents, and feel anxious about the overall relationship with their parent.
Behaviorally Controlling
Behavioral control, structuring and regulating child behaviors, is more complicated. Behavioral control includes both strategies promoting healthy development and autonomy, and approaches that cause problems and undermine autonomy. Simply put, the healthy version of behavioral control is structure; the unhealthy version is pressure.
Healthy behavioral control like communicating consistent limits and behavior expectations (eg, attend school daily, eat more than pasta) help children thrive and grow. The autonomy-supportive version of behavioral control includes setting clear and consistent limits, acknowledging the child’s perspective, using choices, communicating rationale for limits, and delineating consequences of not following limits.
A lack of limits or behavioral expectations, aka permissive parenting, relates to poor outcomes and is considered an ineffective parenting approach. So, to be clear, autonomy-supportive parenting does not mean the child gets to decide everything and throw limits out the window! Limits encourage responsibility in children; it’s all in the how of setting and enforcing these limits.
The controlling approach relies on external forces like rewards and punishments to pressure a child to engage in a behavior (“if you don’t put away the iPad right now, you lose it the rest of the week”). The negative subtype of behavioral control is external control, which includes threats of punishment, withdrawal of privileges, and coercive use of rewards. These tactics result in a child feeling motivated by external pressures, either behaving a certain way to obtain a reward or avoid a punishment, rather than because of internalizing the meaning and purpose of a desired behavior. Children who experience more external control show higher risk for drug abuse, delinquency, and oppositional defiant behaviors
Hmmm, you may say, don’t children need incentives and consequences for their behaviors? Yes, and this is again where the how matters.
Case Study: “Clean Your Room!”
Let’s take one of the banes of my parenting existence, messy rooms. A limit-free parenting approach would mean my children literally living in their own filth because they don’t seem to care (perfect illustration of no internal motivation meeting undesirable activity of cleaning room, thus the need for parent involvement!).
I can promise you that our default setting when it comes to disastrous rooms – exerting control through demands and possibly some yelling - does not work, and chips away at the closeness of relationships so important to all of us. So, (most of the time) we have shifted from “THIS ROOM WILL BE CLEANED BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE TODAY” to “I bet you would find those shoes you lost once you clean your room; when do you think is a good time this weekend to do that?”
This approach takes some artistry, as you figure out what kind of flexible language works best with each kid, and how firm limits may need to be depending on child personality. My youngest needs the predictability of Sunday morning for room cleaning; if ever a suggestion arises to consider Saturday morning, the resulting refusal is just as predictable. My oldest will push it off until she hopes we forget, so she needs encouragement to JUST DO IT, maybe while listening to music or with something fun to look forward to when she’s done.
Rewards: To Use or Not To Use?
Rewards as a form of external control may cause the most confusion. I have noticed their unpopularity in mainstream parenting guidance despite my understanding (and use) of them as a psychologist as an evidence-based way to help a struggling child. In his book about motivation, Why We Do What We Do, Edward Deci clarifies that experimental studies show that rewards used in a controlling manner reduce internal motivation, but when using rewards as an acknowledgment of positive behaviors, the negative effects on internal motivation disappear, and can be positive and beneficial.
Putting this to practice in my home, I learned this shift can be as simple as changing a few words, basically removing the “if/then” pressure. For example, instead of “If you clean your room, then we can go sledding,” I say, “After you’re done with morning chores, we will be ready to go sledding.” This sets up a more naturalistic expectation of doing “work before fun,” rather than using the reward of a fun outing to “make” the child clean.
From Research to Real Life
In real life, most of us do not parent only one way (controlling) or the other way (autonomy-supportive). Every one of us will have more controlling days, and more autonomy-supportive days. Our mood and stress affect both how our children respond to us and how we are interacting with them. Just think of interactions during the morning rush to get out the door, or attempting to “work” from home while children are interrupting. In the dark days of remote learning, I was known to yell “go to class now!” and slam a door when the built-up stress of all I had not accomplished bubbled over.
Research also captures more of the extremes when in real life most of us parent in the middle. We may take some controlling approaches that definitely undermine internal motivation, especially under stress and tight time crunches, but that is different from shaming our child.
I have increased my own awareness of controlling behaviors with my kids, and experimented with modifying them to align more with autonomy support, or at least to be less controlling. For example, with homework, instead of implementing a rigid schedule of when they do it, including the limit of doing homework before screen time, I tested a more fluid approach. “What do you need to get done today? When do you think is a good time to do that? How are you going to make sure you get it all done and have time to relax?” This hands them more control over their time and sequencing work and relaxation in a way that feels right to them, rather than sitting down at a certain time because of the external regulation designated as “homework time.”
You might be thinking, “this will never work with my kid,” and you might be right. Some children, especially younger ones and those with executive functioning weaknesses, will likely choose what feels good in the moment over planning ahead. These children may say they will do their homework after relaxing, and then resist once homework time arrives. Enter: temptation to control! Use the knowledge of your child to match their needs: if they do not have the ability to plan their time, you can still provide structure without being controlling. For example, use a reward as an acknowledgment of doing homework when they hate it, rather than to force them to do it: “After we get through spelling, let’s go have a snowball fight.”
Who’s Actually in Charge? Not Just Us
We are not the only ones doing the shaping, our children also shape our parenting. Research and real-life experience make clear that child temperament, personality, and behaviors influence parent-child interactions. Certain children bring out more controlling responses from adults, which then perpetuates behaviors to gain their own sense of control.
Critical note: we can engage in the same parenting practices with multiple children, and these practices will be experienced differently by each child.
Another real-life experience validated by research is that the more our basic needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are satisfied, the more autonomy-supportive we act with others. It helps if our cup is full (or at least not half-empty with lukewarm coffee) for us to have the energy, patience, and empathy required to do the same for our children.
This relates to the fact that high levels of stress greatly influence parenting. Research backs up the reasonable assumption that higher stress results in more controlling behaviors. And parents are really stressed these days, to state the most obvious. Now more than ever we need to recognize that systems and larger forces impact family well-being because of how they add stress to parents.
Autonomy for All!
The bottom line is if we want to raise children who feel autonomous in the world – a strong sense of self and self-worth, living by their values – we need to be less controlling. When we control less, our children experience more freedom to explore the why of behaviors, internalizing the purpose and meaning of doing what we want them to (like be on time) instead of learning to do a behavior just to please us or avoid punishment. If we can cut down on the controlling feedback loop (the more we control them, the more they want to assert control, further frustrating us) in favor of an autonomy loop (the more we support their autonomy through choice and agency, the more internal motivation, and less pressure needed from us), we all win. If not every Saturday morning, at least most of the time.
**You can pre-order my book Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children on Amazon and Bookshop.