December 1, 2025
An Ivy League psychologist says parents should encourage healthy disobedience in their children to help build future confidence.
Experts warn that parents who focus heavily on training their children always to be obedient and respectful may unintentionally undermine their kids’ future confidence and ability to advocate for themselves.
Organizational psychologist Sunita Sah, a professor of management and organizations at Cornell University, appeared on the Nov. 11 episode of the Good Inside podcast, explaining that allowing children a bit of healthy disobedience can help them grow into confident, assertive adults.
“Sometimes, it is bad to be so good, [and] there are situations you want people to be speaking up,” Sah said.
While parents often overemphasize compliance and respect, traits that make parenting easier and earn praise for a child’s behavior, Sah warns that failing to teach kids how to assert themselves in appropriate situations can leave them feeling “awkward [and] uncomfortable” when standing their ground as adults.
Sah explained that children who exhibit healthy defiance by pushing back against adults in the wrong or speaking out against peers bullying a classmate learn to respectfully stand up for themselves, even when someone else, including a parent, has told them they’re wrong.
“If we haven’t learned how to [be defiant], we end up saying ‘yes’ a lot,” Sah said. “We end up either being silent [or] being compliant and getting ourselves in situations that we would rather not be in.”
Sah recommended that children “practice” assertiveness through occasional, intentional “small acts of defiance.” As for parents who take issue with this approach, they need a “mindset shift” in how they define defiance, Sah said. Practicing defiance doesn’t mean a child has to be “loud, bold, and aggressive” or disrupt and harm others, she explained.
“That is really thinking of defiance as a personality trait,” Sah said. “It’s actually just a skill, and it’s one that we can learn [with] this mindset shift … There’s ways to be quietly defiant, where we can live in alignment with our values without having to be aggressive about it.”
“If we are always telling them to obey us, how can they actually then determine what it is that they truly want?” she added.
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