Why Trying to Control Young People Doesn't Work and What Australian Professionals Can Do Instead

When a 14-year-old punches a wall during an argument, what's your first instinct? If you're like other professionals working with families, you're probably thinking about safety and consequences. Time-out. Loss of privileges. A stern talking-to about acceptable behaviour.

Here's the problem: that instinct is precisely what perpetuates the cycle you're trying to break.

The Control Trap

For decades, research into coercion theory (first articulated by psychologist Gerald Patterson in 1982) has shown us something uncomfortable: adults and young people lock into vicious cycles where each attempts to control the other. Parents oscillate between harsh punishment and submission. Teachers alternate between rigid discipline and helpless frustration. The young person learns that escalation works.

Research shows that coercive interactions between caregivers and children drive escalations in oppositional and aggressive behaviour. When a child reacts with anger to a directive, it evokes adult hostility, which intensifies as the cycle escalates, until someone "wins" PubMed Central. But nobody actually wins. Parents become either rigidly punitive or inconsistently indiscriminate in their responses. Hostile parents respond to children in indiscriminate ways, equally likely to initiate positive and aversive exchanges PubMed Central.

The language around these struggles reveals the dynamic: "They can't make me do anything." "I have to give him money or he'll destroy the house." Control and obedience become the battleground, and everyone loses.

Why Punishment Fails

Punishment might temporarily suppress behaviour, but once the punishment is removed, the behaviour returns, sometimes more extreme than before Penn State. This isn't a failure of willpower or consistency. It's how coercion works.

Although harsh parenting techniques might reduce aversive child behaviour in the short term, they often serve as negative reinforcement for children's problem behaviour. Children's noncompliance serves to avoid or escape parental demands. When both parent and child are engaged in this coercive effort to "win" a conflict, escalation is the rule rather than exception PubMed Central.

Australian teachers see this in classrooms daily. A student disrupts class. The teacher responds with a sanction. The student escalates. The teacher increases consequences. The student refuses to comply. Eventually, someone backs down, and the pattern is reinforced. Foster carers experience it when traumatised young people test boundaries. Mental health workers encounter it when families arrive exhausted from years of trying to control uncontrollable behaviour.

The Helplessness Factor

What gets less attention is what happens to the adults caught in these cycles. As young people become more effective at exerting control and more violent, and helplessness grows in parents, teachers, or carers, these adults show signs of traumatisation—symptoms of post-traumatic stress or depression Nvrireland.

This helplessness is real. You've seen it, or felt it. Parents who flinch when their child walks into a room. Teachers who dread particular lessons. Foster carers who wonder whether they're actually making things worse. The professional who thinks, "Nothing I try works."

That feeling isn't a sign you're incompetent. It's a sign you're stuck in a coercive cycle.

Enter Non-Violent Resistance

Non-Violent Resistance (NVR) and Relational Presence offer a radically different approach. Instead of trying to control the young person, adults focus on changing their own responses. Training in NVR reduces parental helplessness, submission, and violence, helping families break away from the cycle of coercion PubMed Central.

The core insight: you cannot control someone who refuses to be controlled. But you can refuse to participate in the destructive dance. You can maintain your presence without resorting to violence or submission. You can resist harmful behaviours through de-escalation, delayed action, and mobilising support.

By carefully planning decisive, yet non-escalatory, delayed responses and enlisting the calming support of other adults, parents become enabled to act from a lower arousal baseline. Lower arousal levels are conducive to reasoning, reflective functioning, and improved understanding of one's own and the other person's emotional processes Pantharhei.

What the Evidence Shows

The research backing NVR is substantial. Studies in Israel, Germany, England, and Belgium demonstrated NVR's efficacy across social and cultural settings. NVR effectively reduces violence and other externalising symptoms, parent-child escalation, and parental helplessness. Treatment feasibility and acceptability were high, with dropout rates between five and twenty percent PubMed Central.

Compare that to typical parent training programmes where dropout rates routinely exceed 50%. When approaches respect people rather than attempting to control them, engagement follows.

For schools, the implications are significant. NVR promotes authority rooted in self-regulation and relational strength—not fear or control. It shifts focus towards presence, reflection, openness and reconciliation Aep. This means moving away from exclusions that don't work and sanctions that escalate problems, toward maintaining connection while resisting harmful behaviour.

In mental health settings, NVR provides tools for working with young people who refuse to engage. Traditional therapy requires the young person's cooperation. NVR recognises that adults can take action even when the young person rejects help. Through raising presence, involving support networks, and persistent reconciliation gestures, adults demonstrate care that doesn't depend on the young person's response.

Foster and residential care settings have seen particularly powerful outcomes. When staff learn NVR principles, they can manage extremely challenging behaviours without resorting to restraint or giving up. The relationship becomes the intervention.

A Different Kind of Authority

NVR constitutes a key difference from behaviourally oriented approaches. Adults must overcome expectations that young people should respond with gratefulness, affection, or remorse. Reconciliation gestures aim to fundamentally improve relationships, not to reward desired behaviour. Repeatedly making gestures when previous ones have been refused reassures the young person of the unconditional nature of the adult's response Nvrireland.

This is profoundly countercultural. It means persisting when rejected. It means maintaining presence when pushed away. It means offering connection without demanding reciprocity.

For professionals trained in behaviour modification, this represents a paradigm shift. We're not managing behaviour. We're building relationships strong enough to weather the behaviour.

Moving Forward in Australia

Australian professionals across education, mental health, and child protection are increasingly recognising that control-based approaches create more problems than they solve. The question isn't whether young people should comply, it's how adults can maintain authority and connection simultaneously.

Compass Seminars Australia offers comprehensive training in NVR and Relational Presence through their three-day workshop "From Chaos to Connection". Led by registered psychologist Tamar Sloan, the training provides practical, evidence-based strategies for teachers, mental health workers, and other professionals supporting families with challenging behaviours.

The workshop addresses real-world complexity (neurodivergence, anxious avoidance, child-to-carer aggression) through interactive case studies and reflective practice. Participants learn to implement strategies immediately while developing the theoretical foundation for long-term application.

If you're tired of approaches that create more distance, more escalation, and more helplessness, it's time to learn a different way. One that acknowledges a basic truth: we can't control other people, but we can profoundly influence the relational field we all occupy. That influence, properly cultivated, changes everything.