One of the most concerning trends across child protection, family law, education, and mental health systems is how often children’s distress is interpreted as resistance.

A child refuses contact and is described as oppositional. A young person disengages from therapy and is labelled unmotivated. A child becomes dysregulated during an assessment and is seen as manipulative. Yet distress and resistance are not the same thing.

The difficulty is that systems are designed to achieve outcomes. Contact needs to occur. Assessments need to be completed. Therapy requires participation. When children struggle to engage, the focus can quickly shift to overcoming the barrier rather than understanding what the barrier represents.

What if some of the behaviours we call resistance are actually communication?

Children rarely have the language to explain fear, uncertainty, divided loyalties, shame, overwhelm, or trauma. Instead, these experiences emerge through avoidance, withdrawal, anger, silence, inconsistency, or refusal.

The question is not whether a child is resisting.

The question is: what is the child protecting themselves from?

When we mistake distress for defiance, we risk escalating the very behaviours we are trying to resolve. When we understand distress as information, different possibilities emerge.

Sometimes the most important assessment question is not “How do we get the child to comply?” but “What is this behaviour telling us?”