When they are three or four or five at most, there is still a comic element to it.
The small dictator, the tiny one who turns the household round her finger. Parental complaints about the tyrants of nursery age, painful as they are, still contain a basic awareness that the balance of power is clear: the parents are stronger.
Years pass and adolescence bursts into the house, sometimes in a prickly and bitter storm — arrogant speech, sweeping disregard, and hostility. A great deal of hostility.
But above all there is a further element, more troubling than any of the preceding ones. Threats.
If you do not buy it for me, I will not go to school. If you do not let me, I will not come home.
Stop reading for a moment and ask yourself what you felt reading that. What was the first intuitive response that arose in you?
Every reader automatically produces, in the face of such scenarios, one of three modes of coping: paralysis, surrender, or action. These are, incidentally, not remotely new — they are a modern version of the cave-dweller's repertoire of fight, flight or freeze.
One. Paralysis.
You do not know what to do. You freeze on the spot. Confused. A great many modern parents — too many — know the mental state of being at a loss rather too intimately, which naturally leads them to hire the services of those who give advice.
Two. Surrender.
You give up. You come to terms with the situation. You let the adolescent do as she wishes, and do not respond.
Fairness requires me to note that in certain cases this is not a bad option. Every parent of an adolescent has internalised that they must choose their battles wisely, and alongside the subjects we choose to confront head-on there will undoubtedly be areas of life where we simply concede, in the private recognition that they are secondary.
Three. Action.
And here is the distinction that matters more than any of the three, because the modern parent's dread of causing psychological damage frequently produces exactly the paralysis described above.
A threat concerning behaviour — school, coming home, an object — is a negotiating position, and it works precisely to the degree that it is rewarded. Meeting it calmly and without capitulating is not cruelty; it is the only response that does not teach the child that escalation is the mechanism by which things are obtained in this household.
A threat of self-harm is an entirely different category and must never be treated as a negotiating position. It is not manipulation to be outlasted, whatever else may also be true about the relationship. It is a matter for professional help, promptly, and the parent's job is to obtain that rather than to interpret it.
Conflating those two is the single most damaging error available here — in both directions.