Preferential conflict between parents and their children does not necessarily dissipate when parents temporize or restrict children's preferences. What happens next depends on children's reactions to their preferences being temporized or restricted and on parental responses to children's reactions. In this chapter, I focus on how parents discipline their children and what they do when their children are recalcitrant. In particular, I see disciplinary contexts as ones that entail choice on both the child's and the parent's part as to how to behave. Children can make what parents perceive as wrong choices in continuing to be defiant or avoiding to take responsibility for their misbehaviors. Parents can choose how to respond to their child's behavior; they can prevent or promote the escalation of conflict depending on the strategies they themselves adopt during disciplinary encounters, as discussed below.

ESCALATION OF PREFERENTIAL CONFLICT

When children go along with the imposed restrictions on their preferences, interaction with their parents can generally proceed smoothly. That is, children may acknowledge the conflict but behave in ways that reflect their parents’ preferences rather than their own.