Expert tips to get your child to listen to you
1. Be sure you have their attention
Instead of yelling from the kitchen into nothingness while our children are busy with other things, make sure they are looking at you. Make sure there is a connection between you, and they can actually hear you.
2. Actually connect
When your children receive an instruction from you, do they feel seen heard and valued?
To connect with our children, we need to:
- Stop what we’re doing
- Get on their level
- Look into their eyes
- Breathe with them and be present
3. Use as few words as possible
You don’t need to praise them, beg them or explain everything in detail.
Keep your instructions clear and simple. Give them their names and then one or two words of what’s expected.
“Annabel, your shoes.”
Keeping it short means giving your child credit for having a brain. They know what you mean!
4. Acknowledge our children’s feelings
Every now and then instead of them doing the thing, they will go into full meltdown mode.
When that happens you know that they are probably HALTS and what you are asking them is probably a little bit too much in that moment.
Here is the solution: emotion coaching. Name the emotion: if you name it, you can tame it. If it’s mentionable, it is manageable.
Show compassion – you see them in their suffering, and you join them in it. That makes all the difference.
The objective is for us to stay appropriately distanced emotionally while still being involved, caring and compassionate.
5. Offer choices
Research suggests that the more options there are, the more overwhelmed we feel and the less likely they are to make a choice.
At the same time our children thrive on autonomy – they want choice.
They key is to give them a choice, but to limit them. “Do you want to wear the green jumper or the red one? Do you want jam on toast or peanut butter?”
6. Give transition warnings frequently
Step your child through transition warnings pre-emptively.
Before going to the park, explain to your child that you will give transitions warnings and what they will mean. “When I say one minute to go, we’ll get ready to pack everything up and get into the car”.
Ask your child to repeat what you said: “When I say one minute to go, what do we do?”
When we give transition warnings, we give them the opportunity to feel safe, to predict and know what’s coming.
7. We need to adjust our expectations
The reality is, we are dealing with toddlers. They have extremely limited capacity for emotional and behavioural control.
As parents our job is to understand where they are at right now. They will get older, and it is our job to teach them.
8. We need to dump the “don’t”
When we say “don’t do this” “don’t do that” to our children, we give them two things to process:
- The thing that you want them to stop
- The thing you want them to do instead
We must learn to give instructions with a DO instead: “Don’t hit your sister” turns into “Be gentle with your sister”.
9. Get them to repeat what you asked them to do
The goal is to extract a commitment from your child.
“What was it that I asked you to do?”
“Do you want me to show you how?”
10. We need to be the example
If we need our kids to keep it together, we need to do the same.
Emotions are contagious.
Our children catch our crazy, but they also catch our calm.