EP64: Bad Children Don’t Exist
When character becomes a convenient explanation
I was listening to a novel recently (fiction, which I almost never do anymore, but every now and then I feel the need to step out of my own thinking and into someone else’s) and there was a sentence that stayed with me in a way I didn’t expect.
The main character, a widower, talks about his children as feral. Not cruelly, not dramatically, almost pragmatically. They are loud, unruly, badly behaved, and exhausting. He says it with the tired honesty of someone who feels outnumbered. And then, almost as an aside, he adds that what he really needs now is a new wife, someone who can finally teach them how to behave.
Later in the book, another character offers what sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation: children need lots of love and attention, and enough discipline to grow up secure.
I remember nodding when I heard it. Because I agree with that sentence completely. I’ve said versions of it myself many times.
And yet, something about the way those two ideas sat together - the “feral” children and the hope that someone else might fix them - kept bothering me. Because when we talk about children needing love and discipline, we often underestimate how demanding that actually is of the adult.
Love is not permissiveness. Discipline is not control. And security doesn’t come from either in isolation. Security comes from relationship, from adults who are willing to stay in their role even when it would be easier to step out of it.
What struck me about the widower wasn’t his exhaustion, that made sense, but the quiet displacement of responsibility. The idea that the problem lived in the children, and that the solution would arrive in the form of another adult who would somehow succeed where he felt he had failed.
It’s a story we tell in many ways.
At school, when certain children are described as disruptive before they’re described as curious, funny, sharp, or sensitive. At home, when parents start introducing their child with an apology. In conversations where behaviour becomes destiny, and a phase becomes a personality.
“This one has always been difficult.”
“She’s just like that.”
“He’s one of the bad ones.”
What we rarely stop to examine is what happens to a child when behaviour is no longer treated as something that emerges, but as something that defines: there is a profound difference between saying “this behaviour isn’t working” and saying, implicitly or explicitly, “you are the problem.”
Children may not have the language to argue with that distinction, but they feel it immediately. And once a child begins to experience themselves as the difficult one, the unruly one, the feral one, something quietly shifts. The effort to belong gives way to the decision to perform the role they’ve been assigned. Not out of defiance, but out of coherence: if this is who I am in this system, then this is how I behave.
This is where discipline alone will never be enough. Because discipline without relationship doesn’t teach security, it teaches adaptation. And adaptation is clever, but it isn’t teaching anything.
Some children adapt by becoming invisible. Others adapt by becoming disruptive. Both are responses to the same question: How do I survive here?
When we say children need enough discipline to grow up secure, what we often mean, without articulating it, is that they need adults who are willing to offer structure without withdrawing connection, and guidance without humiliating dependence. That’s much harder than enforcing rules.
It requires presence and coherence. It requires adults who can tolerate being disliked without becoming punitive, and being needed without becoming permissive.
The children who are labelled “bad” are often the ones testing whether that kind of adult actually exists.
They test boundaries not because they don’t want them, but because they’re checking whether the boundary holds them, not just the adult’s mood. They push limits to see whether love survives friction. They provoke to find out whether the relationship collapses under pressure or becomes clearer.
This is not ferality. This is attachment work.
And it’s exhausting.
It’s far easier to outsource it: to a stricter teacher, a tougher parent, a new partner, a system, a diagnosis, than to stay in the discomfort of leading a child who refuses to simply comply.
But leadership is exactly what these children are asking for. Not domination nor control.
In my book, I write about building a house of trust, because trust is not built through explanation or affection alone. It’s built through repetition, through predictability, through adults who mean what they say and say what they mean, who don’t change the rules depending on who’s watching or how tired they are.
Inside that house, discipline feels different. It doesn’t land as rejection. It doesn’t threaten belonging. It teaches orientation - this is how we do things here - without turning the child into the problem.
This is also where language becomes decisive.
Not motivational language. Not therapeutic language. Everyday language.
The tone we use when we correct. The words we choose when we’re frustrated. The way we talk about a child when they can hear us, and when they can’t.
Children live inside the frequency we set long before they understand the content.
A home, a classroom, a family has a frequency. Some feel tight and vigilant. Others feel chaotic. Some feel stable enough to play inside. And children adapt to that frequency with extraordinary precision.
So when we talk about children needing love and attention and discipline, I think what we’re really talking about is the adult’s willingness to stay conscious inside the relationship, rather than reactive inside the behaviour.
Because children don’t become secure when adults are perfect. They become secure when adults are reliable. And reliability is relational, not performative.
The widower in the novel wasn’t wrong to feel overwhelmed. But the transformation, for him and for the children, would never come from someone else fixing them. It would come from a shift in how responsibility, authority, and relationship were held.
Children are not feral by nature. They become “wild” when the structure around them feels uncertain, inconsistent, or emotionally unsafe.
And when that structure changes, when adults reclaim leadership not as control, but as presence, behaviour changes too. Not because children are fixed, but because the system they are responding to finally makes sense.
That’s not a quick solution.
It’s not an easy one.
But it’s the only one that actually transforms anything.