"They're being defiant"

Sometimes the letdown comes with a no. Not a forgotten kit but a refused one. Not carrying on with the tablet but "I'm not coming off". That's not capacity, you'd say. That's a stance.

Two things. The first is what a nine-year-old's no is made of. In my observation it's rarely a considered position on parental authority. It's an in-the-moment response to a demand that arrived while the child was doing something they wanted to do, and it comes out of the same place as the carrying on, which is that stopping is hard and the words for that at nine are "no" and "in a minute". A child who says no to coming off the tablet at half past seven and then comes off it at twenty-five to eight without further incident wasn't making a stand. They were finding the stopping hard and saying so badly.

The second is for the older ones, and it's worth having in view even if yours is nine, because nine becomes thirteen. Laurence Steinberg, in a 2008 review, set out what developmental neuroscience suggests about why risk-taking and impulsive behaviour rise in early adolescence and fall again in the twenties. The account is that around puberty, the brain's systems for seeking reward, especially in the company of peers, undergo a rapid change, while the systems for self-control develop more slowly, through adolescence and into young adulthood. The two are on different timetables, and mid-adolescence is where the gap between them is widest. A thirteen-year-old is a person with an adult's wanting and a child's braking, and the no of a thirteen-year-old is that gap speaking.

So defiance, in the sense of a considered refusal of your authority, is rarer than it looks. What's common is a child or a teenager whose wanting outruns their stopping, saying no because the stopping is hard and no is quicker than explaining that. That's a timetable, not a stance, and it's answered by the arrangement, a warning, a visible timer, a handover of the tablet, rather than by a contest of wills, which is a contest the arrangement makes unnecessary.

There's real defiance, and there's a chapter about children whose behaviour is far outside the range in chapter 22. But most no's at nine are tired children who've been asked to do a hard thing at a bad moment, and the word defiant is the label from chapter 10 with a sharper edge.