Three Things to Check Before You React to Your Child
When I work with parents, I ask them to keep an eye on three things. Once you learn to notice them, your language starts to change on its own, because you stop assuming your child is acting against you. What's actually happening is that they're telling you something about what's going on inside them: a need that isn't being met, a frustration they can't name, a feeling you'll have to sit beside and feel with them. The three things are skills, stress, and the state of your relationship. Plenty of the time it's some mix of all three. Other times one of them is obvious.
Start with skills. Ask yourself whether what you're looking at is a skill problem. Is my child simply not developmentally able to do what I'm expecting without my help? Picture a three-year-old on the couch. Shouting "get off the couch" from across the room isn't the move. You can say, "We don't jump on the couch," and if they keep going, you walk over, you set the limit, you let them know you get that jumping is fun, and at the same time you understand that your child is up against a skill they don't have yet. In that moment their impulse control can't stop them. They're too wrapped up in it, too thrilled, and small children don't bend easily.
So that's a skill issue, and it changes what you do. Rather than wearing yourself out repeating the same demand, you go over and say, "I won't let you jump on the couch. I'm going to help you down," and you lift them off, or you offer to help them climb down themselves. You're seeing that this is a skill your child is still building, something maturity will take care of in time. Run across the room yelling and you push them into fear instead. Once they're scared they can't really take in what you're saying, because now their head is full of "I can't stop jumping, it's too much fun, and somebody is angry at me," and no child makes good choices from that corner.
Homework is the same story. It usually isn't "I'm refusing because I want to defy you." More often it's, "This is dull and I have no idea where to begin." Sometimes the whole pile feels like too much: "There are so many assignments I can't sort my own brain out." A lot of kids struggle with executive function simply because it's new and still coming online. We have to name these skill gaps for what they are and drop the idea that children behave badly to prove some point about who they are. No child is aiming to be defiant, or disliked, or impossible to work with. That was never the goal. Look at the skill first.