Why good parenting intentions often make things worse
After COVID, pediatric OPDs across India filled up with a particular kind of case. Mothers came in exhausted, bringing children who could not sit still, could not focus, ran constantly, threw objects, could not hold a conversation with the parent for more than a few seconds. The mothers were not neglectful.
They were devoted. They had rearranged their lives around the child. And yet the child's behavior was escalating.
When asked what they did when the child became fidgety, the picture became clear. They would say: Sit here. Don't behave like this.
Be a good child. Be a good child. Repeated with urgency.
Repeated with a rising voice. And the child would become, as Antano Solar John observes, all the more the bad child. The instruction to stop being difficult was producing more difficulty.
The visible behavior of the parent, which any observer would call well-meaning, was worsening the exact condition they were trying to fix.
This is the gap that separates parenting advice from parenting science. The techniques parents read about, the routines, the consequences, the praise schedules, operate on the surface. What operates underneath is something the parent is not aware they are transmitting.
The parent in the OPD is not screaming because they are a bad parent. They are screaming because they are frightened. That fear is broadcasting before the words come out. And the child is receiving it.
Parenting style in the conventional sense refers to the visible pattern: authoritative versus permissive, structured versus free-range. What none of those frameworks address is the inner state of the parent as the primary signal the child tracks. Children, especially young children, are calibrated to authority figures.
What the authority figure assumes is real becomes real to the child. The consequences of that mechanism, once you see it, change everything about how you think about parenting advice.
The question worth asking is not what should I do when my child misbehaves. The more consequential question is: what am I already assuming about my child before I open my mouth?
Presuppositions: the hidden signal in every parenting interaction
About fifty years ago, a doctor named Milton Erickson worked with patients in ways that confounded the medical establishment. People came to him with challenges ranging from eating disorders to athletic performance and left without the problems they had arrived with. Nobody could study what he was doing.
The medical board considered revoking his license. The legend goes that the inspector assigned to assess Milton ended up on the same flight as him, and returned to say Milton should be allowed to continue. The results were undeniable. The mechanism was invisible.
Milton Erickson had polio twice. The first time, doctors said he would never walk again. He taught himself to walk by sitting at a window as a child and noticing the smallest micro-muscle movements in his body, exercising them hour by hour, month by month, until full function returned.
He was also tone deaf and colorblind, seeing only purple. Because he was tone deaf, when he walked past a church and heard what he assumed were voices talking, he went inside and found a choir. He noticed they were all moving together in synchrony.
He went home and tried matching the breathing and movement of the people around him. He noticed an immediate sense of connection. This was how he discovered unconscious rapport through mirroring.
John Grinder and Richard Bandler, students of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, went to study Erickson using unconscious modeling. Instead of analyzing what Milton did, Grinder mirrored him for two weeks and then went back to California to work with patients presenting the same conditions, without knowing consciously what he was doing.
Over months, Grinder and Bandler replicated Erickson's results and eventually codified the principle Erickson had been using intuitively. That principle is presupposition.
Erickson demonstrated this to groups of medical doctors. He would bring several people onto a stage, place them in an altered state where they were awake but highly receptive, and then look carefully at a corner of the room. After a pause, he would say: What's the color of that dog?
One of the people on stage would say: It's a brown dog. Someone in the audience would stand up: What are you talking about? It's a black dog.
No dog existed. The word 'what' in the question assumes a dog is already there. That assumption, transmitted by someone in deep unconscious rapport with the listener, becomes the listener's experience.
The assumption is the instruction. It skips past the listener's critical faculty and installs a reality.
This is not a technique available only to hypnotists. Every authority figure uses presuppositions, usually without knowing it. Verbal presuppositions are built into sentence structure.
Nonverbal presuppositions are built into posture, timing, tone, and body tension. When a parent leans forward as the child reaches for a jar, bracing to catch it, the nonverbal message is already sent: you are about to drop this. The child is in a state of deep unconscious rapport with the parent.
The parent is an authority figure, which amplifies the signal. The assumption travels and lands before a single word is spoken.
What changes when a parent changes their presuppositions
When parents receive a diagnosis for their child, something specific happens. A doctor accurately identifies autism. The parents did the right thing by seeking help.
The doctor did the right thing by diagnosing accurately. Autism is a wide spectrum. A specific child may carry three or four characteristics from that spectrum.
That specific child, with those specific characteristics, is who the parents took into the clinic.
Then the parents go home and search the entire spectrum. They read every symptom from A to Z. In their minds, they are being responsible.
They want to be prepared. But they begin to see a child who has all of those symptoms, not the child who has three or four. Now the presuppositions begin.
One symptom in the literature is carelessness with objects. The next time the child reaches for a jar, the parent moves to catch it before anything happens. That movement, that readiness, that lean, is a nonverbal presupposition.
It says: you will drop it. The first time, the second time, the third time. By the fourth time, the child drops the jar.
The parent now has evidence. The child now has a new pattern. A symptom that was never organically part of that child has been installed.
The hospital staff who follow these cases observe something that seems counterintuitive. They say the mother creates more disruption than the baby. This is not a criticism of the mother.
It is an observation about where the actual source of the escalating behavior lives. The child is not deteriorating in isolation. The child is deteriorating in relationship.
The relationship carries the presuppositions. The presuppositions shape the behavior. And because the relationship is defined by genuine love, the child is in exceptionally deep rapport with the parent, which means every unconscious assumption transmits with exceptional force.
Authoritative parenting, in its real form, must address the internal layer. Not just clear boundaries and warmth, which is the textbook definition, but clear internal assumptions. What you believe about your child's capability when you are alone, before they enter the room, is already shaping what they will do when they walk in.
The parent who genuinely sees a capable child transmits that in their breathing, posture, and pace. The parent who has quietly decided the child will fail at the next task transmits that with equal precision. Children do not receive your words. They receive your state.
The good parenting tips that hold up under scrutiny are the ones that change what the parent actually believes, not just what the parent says. Auditing your presuppositions is not a soft skill. It is the technical core of every parenting style that produces lasting results.
When a parent shifts their inner assumptions, the child who has been labeled difficult, hyperactive, or careless begins to behave differently. The nonverbal environment they inhabit has changed. The parent changes.
The child follows. That sequence, invisible but precise, is how real capability gets installed.
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