4 Things I Learned To Get My Kids To Listen And Cooperate
When my kids wouldn’t listen, I went through several years where I yelled a lot. I hated it and kept promising myself that I would find a better way. I felt frustrated and tired from all the arguing, and it took a while before the moment arrived when I was fully motivated to change.
After I looked at the reason I was yelling, studied child development, and leaned into my knowledge of different personality types and conflict resolution, I came up with new strategies that made a difference for me and my family. My kids were more loving with us and each other and I started feeling like a better mom.
Here are 4 things I learned that really made a difference.
1) Your kids will listen to you better when they are calm
When your kids are angry, frustrated, overwhelmed and act out, they aren’t ready to listen and comply with anything you want them to do. In these moments, your kids’ brains are full of emotion and the logical part of their brain is not fully engaged.
Your yelling, repeated demands, and punishments won’t be effective. What helps most is to help your child calm down.
The best and fastest way to do this is by accepting and acknowledging your child’s feelings. This is one of the foundational pieces I talk about in my parent coaching.
Accepting feelings means that we believe our child’s feelings are totally valid for them in that moment, even if we think they are overreacting or even if we never behaved this way as a child.
Acknowledging feelings means that we let our child know we completely accept how they are feeling. Typically, this takes the form of an empathetic feeling statement like, “I know you don’t want to get ready for bed right now.” Or “It’s really upsetting when things don’t turn out the way you hoped.”
Hearing these statements lets your child know you accept them and that they don’t have to fight to be understood. These types of statements are soothing and help your child calm down, so they become ready to listen.
2) You can help your kids listen better if you are calm
In order to help our kids calm down, we have to be calm ourselves. Easier said than done, I know, especially if we tend to yell. When we model calm behavior, we keep ourselves from adding more emotion to the situation- we help it deescalate.
How do we calm down?
There are many strategies. For example, you can leave the room for a moment to collect your thoughts, take a deep breath before you speak, or recite a mantra you’ve selected in advance. You can also get introspective and ask yourself what is bothering you most that causes you to yell. Finding this answer can lead you to new insights about how to stay calm.
3) It’s important to be consistent and persistent about what you ask for
Sometimes, you’ll have to ask your child to do something more than once. When my clients first come to me, they have typically been asking their child to do something once or twice and then stopping, because they feel like they’re being too demanding or dictatorial, or because they are getting push back from their child that’s hard to deal with, or because they’re afraid of losing a close relationship with their child, or because they’re just not sure what to do.
Kids learn from how we respond. So, if we ask them to do something or set a limit and then don’t follow through after they don’t do what we asked, they learn that they can get out of things by pushing back.
So first, make sure that whatever you’re asking for is important. If the issue really doesn’t matter, then there’s no need to ask or set a limit in the first place. Sometimes, we ask for things out of habit or without thinking about how important it is to us.
If the issue does matter, then ask yourself what causes you to stop or give in after one or two times. Working on that issue and learning new strategies will allow you to become more consistent and persistent.
When your child sees your new responses and learns that you aren’t going to stop and give in anymore, they will learn to change their behavior too.
4) Problem solving works better than punishments and bribes for persistent misbehavior
When there is an ongoing issue where your child is not behaving, and your child is at least four, one helpful tool is a problem-solving conversation.
In this conversation, you talk about the fact that there is this ongoing issue, in a neutral way without blaming your child.
Then, you ask questions to understand your child’s perspective about it and what is getting in the way of doing it, explain your perspective and why your expectation is important, and then brainstorm potential solutions.
After you have a list of all your ideas, you pick the one you both agree will work best, try it out, and make adjustments, if necessary.
It’s important to have this conversation at a time when you are both calm and open to talking. It also requires trust on your part that if you sit down and talk with your child, and really hear each other, that you can come up with a workable solution.
It’s also a great way to model for your child how to solve problems and resolve conflicts in a calm, respectful and productive way.
Foundational to all the work I do is strengthening the relationships between parents and children.
Family is important because it’s the place we first learn about ourselves, other people, and the world.
We want our kids to grow up well behaved, confident, resilient, and loving us. All of the skills that you use to get kids to listen and cooperate can deepen your relationships with them at the same time.
These skills bring out the best in our children and ourselves.
These skills help us feel confident, knowing we have approaches that work, and feel like the parents we want to be.
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