Children
Reverse psychology is often used on children due to their high tendency to respond with reactance, a desire to restore threatened freedom of action. Some parents feel that the best strategy is sometimes "reverse psychology": telling children to stay in the house when you really want them to choose to go outside and play'.
Questions have however been raised about such an approach when it is more than merely instrumental, in the sense that 'reverse psychology implies a clever manipulation of the misbehaving child' and nothing more. With respect to '"emotional intelligence"... successful fathering', the advice has been given: 'don't try to use reverse psychology....such strategies are confusing, manipulative, dishonest, and they rarely work'. In addition, consistently allowing a child to do the opposite of what he/she is being advised, undermines the authority of the parent.
Read more about this topic: Reverse Psychology
Famous quotes containing the word children:
“It is said that when manners are licentious, a revolution is always near: the virtue of woman being the main girth and bandage of society; because a man will not lay up an estate for children any longer than whilst he believes them to be his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“See, in the Navy, during the war, I got used to the idea that something might happen to me, I might not make it. Well, I also got used to the idea that my wife and children were safe at home, they’d be all right no matter what. But what I didn’t reckon with was that in this, this kind of a monstrous war, something might happen to them, and not to me. Well it did, and I can’t, I can’t cope with it.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“It is indeed typical that you Earth people refuse to believe in the superiority of any world but your own. Children looking into a magnifying glass, imagining the image you see is the image of your true size.”
—Franklin Coen. Joseph Newman. The Monitor (Douglas Spencer)