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A common feature of interventions for students with behavioral difficulties is an attempt by such authorities as parents and teachers to establish increased control over students' behaviors, which can lead to countercontrol. Attempts to exert even greater control over a student who is countercontrolling increase the student's opportunity to countercontrol. In this article, the authors suggest that some children who are diagnosed with chronic behavior disorders might be countercontrolling the very persons who try to control them. The authors define countercontrol, explain how it might occur, and offer guidelines for resolving the problem.
Educators spend a lot of time trying to encourage or motivate students to behave in particular ways. Nevertheless, some students remain impervious to such efforts. Some of these "chronic" resisters are subject to further interventions, perhaps clinical interventions, and eventually they might receive clinical diagnoses like Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), Conduct Disorder (CD), Attention-Deficit/ Hyperacrivity Disorder (ADHD), or Asperger's disorder, as those are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition-Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000).
How do you think about disorders like ODD, CD, ADHD, and Asperger's disorder? Do you explain them in terms of brain dysfunction, chemical imbalances, or other causes that imply that something in the student is not working properly? Or do you think that many student behaviors that are often called "disorders" might instead reveal something about the social interactions that occur in school? Think about this, and we will return to these fundamental questions later in this article.
Most approaches to altering student behavior require educators or clinicians to somehow manage or control students' behavior. In an earlier article in this journal (Carey & Bourbon, 2004), we described problems that can occur when one person (e.g., an educator or clinician) attempts to control the behavior of another person (e.g., a student). In particular, we described the phenomenon of countercontrol, in which a student who is controlled by an educator in turn countercontrols the educator. In the present article, we suggest that an understanding of countercontrol provides a key to better understanding many chronic behavior problems.
We begin this article by explaining what we mean by countercontrol. We provide a definition, suggest some implications of countercontrol, and point out why we...