alfie kohn

Dear Parents: Please Stop Trying to Control Your Children

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / 2 Comments

Ok, look. I’ve broached this subject over a 100 times in various forums, blogs, journals, social media posts — you name it. And I usually spend a lot of time coddling us all as we navigate the tender history of our own parenting and our parents’ parenting, and I do my best to make an honest but gentle critique of this major flaw in our current child-raising paradigm. But it’s gotten to the point where when I see another credentialed practitioner espousing the merits of “praising the right way” or “employing natural consequences”, I start banging my forehead on my palm.

We have got to get this tired notion out of our heads, friends. We’ve got to quit our addiction to Behaviorism.

It should be pointed out, for those of you who’ve never heard the story, that Behaviorism — a pseudoscience based on the notion that human behavior is a malleable commodity to be controlled and harvested for economic advantage — was designed to make subjects do whatever they were told. Not simply to do what was preferable, or intelligent, or kind, but anything that was commanded and associated with reward and/or punishment. And frankly, it’s very effective in certain cases, to a certain extent, and more so with adults than children. But it just so happens to have us all focussing on the least important thing about us humans.

We are not just what we do. Nor are we merely valuable for what someone else can make us do.

Consider the implications of that, if you will, for just a moment…

When it comes to raising our children — we want them to know, and understand, and feel it in their bones, that we love, and value, and cherish them for no other reason than that they are. That they exist. Not because of what they do, or will do if we turn the right screws. And because we want them to never even question their worth to us, and to develop a healthy sense of self-worth — we absolutely have to stop dealing with them solely on the level of how to make them do just what we want.

We have been tricked into thinking that A+B=C, when in fact, A+B only ever equals (A+B). When we take a child (A) and add Behavioristic manipulation (B), we do not automatically get cooperation (C) and we certainly don’t guarantee getting a controlled or “good” child. All we ever assure ourselves under that equation is that we get a manipulated child. That child not only learns to manipulate others in her life, she also learns that none of us matter except inasmuch as we allow ourselves to be what someone else wants us to be. I hope as you read it to yourself, you hear/d how dangerous that is.

The raw truth is that we don’t actually want our children to grow up to be easily controlled. So we had better stop training them for that way of life and that variety of perspective on themselves.

“So then,” you may wonder, “how the H do we get our kids to do what we want??” And the answer is we ask. That’s it. That’s all there is to the magic of cooperation. That’s our only (dignified, nonviolent) tool for getting what we want with anyone else in the world. Why would we use any other method with our kids? Why should we? Unless we screw it up by trying to manipulate them all the time, our children are the most likely humans on the planet to cooperate with us — far and away more willing to do what we ask far more often than anyone anywhere ever. And while we’re at it, maybe we want to have more reasonable expectations in terms of how much we ask them to do and how much they’re willing to do.

No one on Earth ought to live life being willing to do whatever we ask of them regardless of what it is or how they feel just because we ask. Not even our own kids.

If we want cooperation from our kids — because why would we really want more than that — then we would do well to focus on co-operating with them. When we co-operate, we’re not just complying or expecting compliance, we’re actually working together — operating in company. No one is trying to make anyone else do stuff all the time, and no one is just doing for the other all the time either. We’re doing together — we’re meeting needs together, we’re accomplishing goals together, we wading through all the things that come up for each of us together. The idea that we should rely on our children to be or do more than that is simply an unreasonable expectation that Behaviorism has hoodwinked us into chasing.

And when we ask, and they say “No,” or whine and stall, or throw themselves bodily onto the floor — and they will just because they are human and they are young — our job is not to double-down on trying to force or bribe them into respectfully performing our will. As leaders in the co-operative field of the family, our job is to work together in order to be able to work together! If one part of the unit is having trouble functioning normally, we help it! We don’t override it, or ignore it, or coax it to just go ahead and operate as is.

In order to address breakdowns in co-operation, we get curious. We look for the feelings beneath what our children are doing or not doing. We look to see if there are underlying needs they are attempting to meet.

And when we find something down there below the behavioral surface — because when they won’t do what we ask, it’s almost always due to some uncomfortable emotion(s) or unmet need(s) they’re feeling — we pause the “-operation” and focus on the “co-”. We connect. If there are feelings blocking our children’s ability to work with us, then we look at those together, and offer our children empathy and touch as we hear and make room for their emotions. If there are, as yet, unmet needs lurking below the disquieting feelings, then we look to help our children address those. Before we expect that they will be able to operate again.

When we address feelings — whether it is manic exuberance or riling anger or tender anxiety — we remove the burden blocking our children’s emotional drive to work with us. And when we focus our efforts on helping our children meet their needs — rather than on securing their unflinching compliance — we remove the obstacle(s) to their willingness to help us meet our needs. When we co-operate with them, then they naturally cooperate with us. C+C=(C+C)! It’s as simple as that.

If you find yourself needing more convincing on how terribly behavior-focussed parenting serves us all (parents and children alike), I encourage you to delve into the works of Alfie Kohn. Unconditional Parenting and Punished by Rewards are his two most notable tomes on the subject, and should be enough to convince even the most empirically-minded among us. You can also order a DVD of Kohn delivering an excellent address on Unconditional Parenting at the UP link above, for those of you who can’t stand to ever read another parenting book in your life.

The bottomline of all this is simply that we don’t need to control our children’s behavior to make them “good” people. We just need to understand them and support them in being their best selves.

So please, my dear fellow parents, let’s all decide to be done with critiquing and manipulating how our children behave. And instead, let’s get laser-focussed on co-operating to meet needs and to process those underlying feelings, before we ask our kids to do anything else. We’ll all get much further if we agree to go together.

For those of you who want more information or who want support while navigating the subtleties of co-operation, I happily invite you to come and get it!

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Be well.

 

Losing “No” and Finding “Yes!”

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / Leave a comment

nurturing

I have written directly about a portion of the discourse I want to take up in this post in some detail before, and referred to this notion multiple times. Thus far, however, I have only closely considered the “no” side of the equation. I want to spend some time today talking more about the “yes” side of parenting. I’ll explain more what I mean by that in a minute, but first, I want to lay a particular foundation of perspective on the role of the parent in child-rearing.

I don’t want to waste your time with remedial parenting concepts, but for those of you who haven’t thought about it, or have been taught the opposite, or once knew but have forgotten — there are two basic perspectives/approaches to raising children. One idea is that we as parents have to continually curb and redirect the otherwise negative impulses of the pretty little chaos balls affectionately called kids (which is the same thing we call baby goats). The other version is that people are born essentially good and kind, and they just need to be educated in how our current society manages the expression of those natural drives. One path is dominated by containment, control, and demand for compliance; the other by empowerment, trust, and cooperation. One is the domain of “No.”. The other is the land of “Yes!”. Depending on which side of this proverbial coin we find ourselves, we will either be more inclined to be a force for narrowing our children’s scope of experience (and therefore the scope of their development as well), or a force for broadening their horizons (and thereby increasing the potential of their development).

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good reasons for a decisive “No”. The problem is simply that too often, if you’ve been brought up or taught to think of the first camp as the superior one, the “no”‘s can quickly get completely out of hand and become a habitual and unnecessarily common response. The main issues with too many “no”‘s are that they get weaker and weaker the more often they are employed, and they put us on the losing end of our children’s biology. Our children have a serious, almost insuppressible urge to experience — to explore, to create, and to enjoy being. That is their prime directive, and this drive must be honoured — the mind-body system won’t let them be daunted in this task. If we fail to meet this need and/or continually subjugate it to our preferences for control and homogeneity and social etiquette, then with or without our kids’ knowledge of it or ability to control it, that biological impulse will find other expressions. Period. This is why so many parents, once headed down the “no” road, find themselves in an endless echo of self-parroting — “No, no, no-no-no-no-no, no, NO!”. They’ve inadvertently stopped-up the normal flow of exploratory impulses so much that it is springing leaks all over the place, and generally the leaks are much worse (i.e. messier, less socially acceptable, and/or otherwise harder to handle), and take more work to stop — both, because there is “pent-up’ force behind them, and because the methods of stopping them simultaneously get less and less a/effective.

Wilhelm Reich (a well-known student of Freud’s in his day) theorized in depth about this mechanism of human biology, and although he is sometimes discounted because of his other theories (see “cloud busters”), I think he got it absolutely right on this one. In his estimation, when the normal impulse drives of a child are repeatedly thwarted and/or repressed, then the child forms an energetic block in a corresponding part of the physical body that in the eventual becomes what Reich called “neuro-muscular  and character armor”. The armor then takes over the repression of the corresponding impulses and thereby creates neuroses. So it is a potentially serious trespass against our children to regularly thwart their need to experience and let their natural impulses flow freely.

The bottom line for the moment is that if we choose, or have been duped into choosing, the  parenting approach of constantly controlling our kids’ behaviors, and wind up getting caught in the habit of “no”-ing our way through every day — we are doing our children a life-long disservice. The parenting mythology that presides over much of what we think of as “normal” and “right” for how to raise our children would have us think that if we don’t control them they will be out of control — but the reality is that the more we try to control them, the more they shift toward a systemic lack of self-control.

But enough about that at present — let’s flip that coin over and take a look at the other side, shall we?

If we adopt the second of the two general parenting perspectives I listed above, and seek instead to reside in an attitude of acceptance, allowance, and empowerment of our children’s natural drives toward exploration and experience, then pretty much the entire terrain of raising our children is altered for the better (that is, for the easier and the more developmentally productive). If we make “yes” our habitual response, look for ways to meet our children’s needs (in this case, a need for information about/interaction with life), and work with our children toward finding mutually satisfying means of honouring their inner drives, then we not only make it easier for them to do exactly what they have come here to do, but we also make it easier for us to get cooperation from them when we need it. Put another way, if we aren’t constantly thwarting their impulses, then fewer of those impulses will need to find side-exits and/or other (less desirable) avenues of expression. And remember, the secondary and tertiary avenues of expressing these repressed drives are almost always less desirable — both to us and to our children’s developing psyches.

Now let’s be very mindful here, I know we are treading dangerously close to that dreaded chasm of Permissiveness… I know we have quite a bit of cultural fear and mythos built around what happens if you just let these lawless half-pints run free. I know there’s even some decent research that seems to show that “kids with no boundaries” turn out worse than “kids raised under an iron thumb”. So, I want it to be clear — both for those of you who do carry some fear of permissiveness and those who don’t — I am not talking about turning a blind eye to what your children do, giving them the green light to run recklessly amuck, or ignoring issues when they arise. And further, I am not even trying to tell you to blindly agree to everything your kids want or begin.

My point here is really only to argue that our job as parents is to nurture growth — that is, to give what is needed to grow. We want them to grow strong, well-rooted, and full. The seed of the oak doesn’t need to be held back from becoming a thorn bush — it just needs to be allowed to become the tree it was born to be. Our children are born to become healthy, happy adults, and they are destined by their own biology to mature in flawless fashion — so long as we don’t blow the whole operation with mistrust, anxiety, disconnection, or ill-concieved plans to dominate the natural processes of development with 50’s Behaviorist psycho-babble.

Therefore, and in order to best serve the natural progression(s) of our children’s development, I believe in the following:

• When our children want to explore, want to try something out, want to taste CD’s, or draw on themselves — we let them. If isn’t a big deal and — as Alfie Kohn so eloquently charges in Unconditional Parenting — if we don’t have a reason to say, “No,” then we say, “Yes!”. We make room, make way, and make nice about it — we don’t try to make our children feel guilty about it, or gross, or in any way unacceptable — when we allow their impulses, we do it with a smile.

• When we can’t, or (the virtual equivalent) we really don’t want to agree to or allow the current experiment, we don’t immediately or automatically refuse. Instead, we do one or more of these:

  1. We empathize — as much as we are able while rooted in our own shoes, we try to get a sense of what it’s like over there in the kid-shoes. They just want to do stuff, and they unconsciously know that it is in their best interest to do stuff and lots of it. They’re driven — without being able to ascertain why — to just go for it. And it’s hard to fit that into a prim, ordered, almost mechanical adult world. It’s really hard to be all jazzed about some idea and have the overlords blare “NO” in your face without any good reason. It’s really really hard to just suck it up, when you get blown out of the water time and time again. When we can get in touch with those feelings — it softens our rigidity, and reminds us to be more allowing, and to make room for healthy development.
  2. We defer — generally by saying something like, “Yes you can do that tomorrow,” or “After lunch,” or we offer some other version of delaying the timing so that we can get on board with the idea, and/or finish what we are doing in order to assist, etc..
  3. We negotiate — we look for a way or ways to honour our preferences and boundaries while still making room for honouring their preferences and drives. Sometimes it may only require a simple tweaking of arrangements, other times it takes a delicate and empathetic finesse. Either way, it is worthwhile in the moment, and in the long-term for the modeling and bond-maintenance it offers.
  4. We address the root need — we may not like the original plan of drawing on the dining room wall with a Sharpie, but we can find a wall that is acceptable to draw on, or another surface, or something just as fun. Under any particular impulse or interest is a more basic one, often we can address and allow that without allowing something we don’t want.
  5. We explain and comfort — we do say “No” multiple times a day: when we have a good reason, when safety is an issue, and when we are just too darned tired or currently juggling too many things to accommodate. When we have a good reason (and our girls are highly trained to look for one when they hear “No”), we tell them about it. We let them know why it doesn’t make sense to us for them to rearrange the entire living room and build a fort right before the grandparents fly in for a visit. We  explain, and then, if and when they have feelings about the denial, we offer them genuine empathy and consolation if they want it. Tonight, I just held Echo and petted her head for 15 minutes, identifying with and validating her feelings because she was upset that she preferred not to wear the headphones to listen to her audio story and we weren’t in agreement to let her play it outloud in the living room because it disturbed Xi’s concentration on the homework she needed to finish. I wasn’t going to change my mind about it, and she wasn’t ready to move on or negotiate a settlement, so I just held her where she was. After awhile her feelings calmed, and she wanted to go talk to Mama about it — they got her set up with headphones and she listened happily until dinner. That scenario is so common that we often say empathizing with our children’s feelings evaporates 80% of the issues that arise without ever addressing or redressing the issue itself.

• For everything between the two poles of what we can immediately allow and what we cannot allow at all — we þεη∂ and strrrreeeeeettcchh and lean in the direction of becoming more open and more allowing and more condoning of our children’s natural impulses and drives to connect with and root themselves in this world and this life as it truly is — not just as is readily convenient for us. It is among the many blessings of this journey as parents to learn to be more compassionate, more understanding, more accepting, and more trusting  of the natural flow of life. Some of us may have been thwarted so much in our lives that it literally hurts to open ourselves to more allowing and more faith in the benevolent process of becoming, but if we can be that brave and remain dedicated, it will surely heal us in ways we cannot even imagine (yet!) — and it will certainly mean that we’ve offered our children the best chance at lifelong health and happiness that we can muster.

And in truth — that’s all we have to do as parents — just give them the best possible chance that we’re able to provide for them to grow to their fullest potential. That means empowering them to follow their natural drives for input and experience, trusting the miraculous design of their biology to do what it was built (tested, reformulated, rebuilt and retested, in perpetuity) to do, and cooperating with, both, the natural processes of maturation and with the little beings we are hoping to help mature. In a word nurturing. To me, that all means saying a whole lot more “Yes!”‘s than “No”‘s, and allowing a whole lot more than barring our children’s being children. After all, it’s always children who do the growing up, whether we adults try to control it or not…

May we all become skilled at nurturing the natural in our children with courage and grace, and plenty of “YES”‘s!

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Be well, my fellow people-growers.

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Want support? Come check out our offerings for parents at the Center for Emotional Education:  http://www.centerforemotionaleducation.com/engage/ ❤

Digging a Little Deeper than “Misbehavior”

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / 2 Comments

emotionalstructurepostersmallSo — there’s this dirty little parenting myth that started decades ago and that lingers still in the rarely mentioned corners of the current social parenting contract corrupting the ears of those who listen, and driving opposition into the hearts of families everywhere. I make it sound sinister, because — well, it is. No one set out to make it so. No one started the parenting shift toward managing positive and negative behaviors as a strategy for instilling character and making our children become good people in order to hurt anyone. No one made Behaviorism the predominant psychological model underpinning all of Western Society’s parenting in order to be mean. We’ve just wound up justifying being mean in order to make our kids good people.

Over time, and according to the predominant mythos, we’ve adopted the habit — the behavioral trait, if you will — of dealing with our kids on the level of behaviors almost exclusively. We’re constantly mowing down behaviors we don’t like (only to have others crop up in their stead), and desperately watering and nurturing and pruning to cultivate the behaviors we do like. Culturally, especially in America, we’re obsessed with “halting misbehavior in it’s tracks!” and just as vehemently if not more so with “catching them being good”, in order of course to make them do whatever that good behavior was more. We’ve been coaxed into believing that if we do these things — if we make them do more good actions and not do as many bad actions — that our children will then in due course (and with due diligence on our parts) become good people. They’ll choose to do the good things we’ve made or bribed them into doing because we’ve made it habitual for them to do so (especially if there’s a reward or punishment around to be the parent in our stead…). They may hate us for it, but they’ll be good people with a strong sense of discipline the myth assures us.

Now, honestly, it would be one thing if this were a viable method. If it worked (particularly, if it was, as the myth portends, the only thing that worked), then it’d be worth considering as an approach to at least ponder from time to time, to pepper in, so to speak. But it doesn’t even do what it set out to do. The scientifically proven method that works so well on so many other species, that even works quite well with adult humans, when applied to human children over time fails utterly at both instilling the behaviors it sets out to instill and inhibiting those behaviors it sets out to inhibit. It furthermore creates resistance to, both, the preferred behaviors and to the system by which the behaviors are manipulated; it also creates a preference for the prohibited behaviors or others of their kind. If you need convincing go to the man who burned down the Behaviorism tower, himself, Alfie Kohn. His quintessential books, Punished by Rewards, and Unconditional Parenting, collect and elucidate the reams of psychological research uncovering the inability of the Behavioristic approach to control our children’s actions — especially in the long run, and especially if there isn’t a reward-and-punisher standing over them.

You know why it doesn’t work? Because we humans are funny. We’re simpler and more complex than Behaviorism pretends. As it turns out, there’s a whole lot that goes into why we choose, or subconsciously move toward, certain actions and not others. Whether we are going to be rewarded or punished (if we’re caught) doesn’t always enter into the equation when humans are embroiled in their amazing interactions with each other. Most of the time we’re acting because of something we think or feel that motivates us — often in spite of almost all the consequences, as we tend to pay way more attention to the outcomes that agree with what we’re motivated toward. Good feelings — which biochemically tend to also invoke good thoughts, resulting in more good feelings, and so on, — inspire actions that most of us like. Less comfortable feelings, especially those ones we’d pretty much all call “bad”, make us biochemically uncomfortable in our minds and bodies; and one of the most common ways of discharging this discomfort is in destructive, disharmonious, uncooperative, even violent action. And if strong emotion is involved, particularly with kids, then there is a loss of higher brain function, and a diminished ability to make “good choices”, to feel empathy, to act compassionately, to even be self-aware, or able to control impulses, or calm down.

This is one reason it’s unfair to expect a child who is feeling awful to do anything other than “misbehave”. They are almost incapable of choosing another course because their feelings are interrupting their brain’s ability to control itself. They are out of their minds. They plead temporary insanity! Give ’em a break judge! 😉

If we really want to effect how our children are behaving, we have to get down underneath the actions themselves, and take a good look at the feelings involved. If it helps, think of their actions as physical code for their feelings. Usually if the feelings are uncomfortable, if the kid is acting out because she feels so rotten, it’s because she has a need (perceived or not) that is going unmet. It’s a further “complexity” in human psychology, but a simple truth, that those “uncomfortable feelings” I describe above, that lead to what we might generally call “disagreeable actions”, most commonly spring from needs that are lingering, causing unsafe, disconnective, unworthy, untrusting feelings or the like which then spring into other feelings of anger and rage and antagonism in order to protect the brain from fear.

It goes like this: unmet needs lead to uncomfortable feelings and out of those come disagreeable actions. And the opposite is how we respond: if we don’t like the actions, then we attempt to assist with the feelings informing the actions, and afterward (because co-processing feelings should always come first) if necessary, we address any underlying unmet needs involved with the uncomfortable feelings (recognizing that often just letting out some uncomfortable feelings and/or getting the connection that comes from doing the process together is enough and no other needs have to be addressed right then). In my opinion, all of parenting is distilled into managing the two directions of this flow.

As Jane Nelsen of the Positive Discipline movement boils it down, “When children feel better, they do better.” I’d go further to say, when children feel better, they think better, they function better, and they’re more capable. At the level of neurochemistry, we empower our children to be “on their best behavior”, simply by being connected to them and helping them get their needs met.

As it turns outs, when we shrug off the Behavioristic shroud obscuring everything our children do, when we take a look underneath their actions, connect with them through empathizing with their feelings, and help them meet their underlying needs, then we get a chance to know what’s below all that, we get to know the truth — namely, that our children always already are good people. They’re like all of us — when our needs are met, and we feel good, we shine. If we give our kids the chance to act from a place of feeling good and connected and supported and with their needs met, then they will surprise us with the kind, compassionate, empathetic choices they will naturally make.

We don’t have to wonder how to make them be good, we just have to give them the chance to be the good people they already are. Yes, we’ll have to show them the ropes — teach them action codes that display feeling good in a socially conducive manner, as well as, how to get their needs met without destroying anything — and it takes time for them to develop their behavioral-linguitic abilities, and the synaptic integrity to manage their emotions and still make good choices under duress. But the goodness (and by that we all really just mean the capacity for human tenderness, social concourse, and cooperation), no matter what it takes to develop it, is always there. If we help them get their needs met, and process their emotions in healthy ways, then their goodness will blossom. And when they’re doing things that we don’t like, it’s just a sign that they need our help to keep the garden healthy.

We don’t have to be stuck spinning our wheels in the behavior-mowing game. We can get passed all that kind of maintenance. And when we do, when we nurture the soil, when we meet the garden’s needs, then the goodness comes flowering out; and we can sit back and enjoy the roses!

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Now, maybe you’ve never gardened this way and you think I’m making it up… Maybe like an industrial farmer, you’re skeptical of this kind of “permaculture”, or you’re not sure how to get started. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss it more, or if you want help converting your garden. I can show you the best tools and how to dig under those weedy actions, as well as how to build up the soil so it produces the good flora that you’d rather see. Don’t hesitate to get in touch — I’m here to help! ❤

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Be well.

Co-Operation Beats Compliance Every Time

/ Nathan M McTague, CPCC, CPDPE, CMNEC / 4 Comments

deaf“How many times do I have to tell you?!” “When are you going to learn?” “If you don’t listen to me…!”  If you’ve ever been around kids for more than a minute, you’ve likely heard some of their parents say at least something like these phrases. If you’ve been a parent longer than a couple years, you’ve likely said one or more of them yourself. At the very least, almost all of us have had similar lines lobbed at us from time to time by our own parents when we were growing up.

The fact is, we parents often find ourselves repeating what we say in a barrage of stuttered phrases, “like a tobacco-auctioneer”: “Come here. Come here. Come’ere. C’mere. C’mere. Here! Here! HERE!” or “No. No. Nonononono! NO!” or “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stoppit. Stoppit. STOPPIT!”. It’s not uncommon. It’s easy to slip into. And part of it is the nature of being the only (supposedly…) rational, full-brained person in the room. But the other fact is, it’s easy to get carried away thinking that our little ones need us to act that way in order to get them to comply with, or even hear, our requests, and “behave!”.

Biologically speaking, our kids are designed to follow our lead. Period. If we don’t screw that up by being too demanding all the time, too inflexible, too authoritarian, too retributive, too exacting, or too permissive (which is actually rarer than we’re taught to think…) — then our kids grow into adolescence trusting our leadership, relying on our authority, and doing (mostly) as we’d prefer. Yes, if we’ve raised them right, they’ll learn to question authority along the way, and we’d do well to entertain those questions in more than a perfunctory manner; but by and large, even when they have questions, they’re still respecting whose role is whose, they’re still looking to our leadership, and they’re still more geared toward following us than not. All we have to do is honour our own roles as leaders by being informative guides, confident captains, and loving parents. I’ve written some on all of those topics before (see the links), but today I want to spend a little more time on the last piece — leadership through love.

The truth is, almost every kid is by nature more compliant than almost every adult (read that again if you need to); it’s just that we’ve been taught to expect them to do every-single-thing-we-ever-say — and that’s not reasonable, no one will ever live up to such a ridiculous ideal, not without losing their own identity anyway… So we have this skewed notion of what’s normal for children — what signifies normal cooperation, and conformity (what we all call “compliance”) — and we expect way more of it from them than makes sense. Even so, expecting that our kids will follow our lead is waaay more productive for everyone involved than assuming the opposite. Mostly, this is because kids rise to meet our expectations of them. If we treat them like convicts, they act like convicts. If we treat them as cooperative, rookie members of our family team, and expect that most of the time, they’ll “eventually get it” (if they don’t already), then 8 times out of 10, that’s what we’ll see.

The single best way to increase cooperation (both, ahead of the game and in the moment) is to turn up the connection. Because they’re born to follow us, and because they’re by nature more likely to do what we say than anyone else ever would be; the only thing we really need to do to get more of that (aside from not screwing it up!) is lean into the natural bond we already share, and that our biology has tuned to perfection for just such a purpose, and let the relationship do it’s magic. By connecting with them, we prove their significance to us, we show them that they belong with us, and both the neurobiology and the psychology of that connection are so compelling that they almost can’t not do what we ask. And all it takes is spending a little time, giving out some hugs, maybe doing a bit of playing, reading, and wrestling — and voila — you’re connecting!

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The bottom line, for the moment is, if your kid isn’t listening to you — I mean really not listening to what you say or request or expect — instead of checking the behavior, maybe  check in with the relationship. Look for ways to communicate significance and belonging to your child, and practice making time and space to connect. Take him on a date just the two of you — his choice. Take her to the park and play together — her lead. Take ten minutes and just snuggle on the couch — and try to be the last one to let go. Leave love notes (even if they’re just crappy pictures). Give free kisses. Hold hands. Smile freely. In a word — relate!

I promise you, it is surprising how much easier it is to get cooperation from a deeply-connected kid. And when we get practiced at throwing our own cooperation into the mix, too (for modeling and bonding purposes, at least!) — well, the difference is hard to believe. In fact, I’m personally convinced (by my own 16, 14, and 10 year-old) that if we get really skilled at co-operating with them (i.e. using our natural leadership, connecting, and working with them to find mutually satisfying solutions to issues as they arise) then we no longer need to worry about enforcing compliance or insuring conformity. When we’re working together to meet needs, be empathetic to feelings, and get things done — we’re working together! We don’t have to demand compliance, because we’re working together. We don’t have to punish them for noncompliance in order to instill obedience, because we’re working together. We don’t have to do anything to them to make them do what we say, because we’re working together.

If we’re not working together with our kids to get everyone’s needs met — that is, co-operating — well, then we’re working too hard. And that’s all there is to it. If we want more cooperation from them, then what we need to do is give more of it to them. If we want them to care about us enough to do what we ask even when they’d rather not, then we have to show them how much we care about them. It’s a direct proportion and a turn key operation. And if you aren’t already — it’s high time you and your family started cashing in!

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To get you started and/or keep you going, here’s some “working with” phrases you can try out that engender an atmosphere of and invite co-operation:

• “It seems like, right now, you are wanting X, and I am wanting Y. How can we make it  work for both of us?”
• “I’d like to help, can you tell me what you need?”
• “I’d like your help with something real quick.” and/or “Can you help me for a minute?”
• “How can we make it a game?” or “What’s the fun version?!”
• “We have to go in the next 10 minutes. Is there anything you want to do before we leave?” then “We’re going to be leaving in about 2 more minutes. Any ‘last things’ you need to do or get?”.
• “I was thinking I’d like to ______ before we leave the park/playground/exploratorium today. What’s one thing you want to do before we leave? Which do you want to do first?”
• “What’s the funnest/#1-super-secret/safest way to get to the car from here? Go!”
• “Since we have to interrupt your game, what part of this do you want to bring with us?”
• “What do you want/need before we _______ ?” or just “What do you need?”
• “How do you want to handle that/this?”
• “What can we do about _________?”
• “What’s your idea…” or “Do you have any ideas for…”
• “Well, we’re in this together. What’s our plan?”
• “This (situation, scenario, dynamic, interaction, etc.) isn’t working for me. Can we/ I’d like to/ I’d prefer we/ Let’s try/ What if we…”
• “That wasn’t what we agreed…/ That wasn’t what I asked for… Do you need more information/time/hugs?”
•”I’d like us to follow-through on what we discussed.” or “I think we should do as we agreed.”
•”We still have to _______ . How can we/I make it easier for you/us?”
• “Will you help me figure out what to do here?”
• “I’m willing to _______ . What are you willing to do?”
• “We can’t ________ . Do you have any other ideas?”
• “Honey, will you please bring me that ______ ?”
• “Will you/everyone please ______ ?”
• “Can we/we all agree to _______ ?”
• “What’s your vote?”
• “What would help?”
• “Do you have a preference?”
• “My favorite way is to… What’s your favorite way?” then if necessary, “Which one sounds more fun/better/easier to you right now?”
• “We have to _______ . What part do you want to pick/choose/make-up/design?”
• Or (no matter the topic) use singing, “We gotta ______ right now. Or I’m gonna have a cow! We gotta do it right away. Or I’ll have to buy some haa-aay!”
• And, of course, don’t forget the NVC classic, which, being a classic, is always in style — “I’m feeling ________ . I need _________ . Will you  ______?”

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If you want (or desperately need!) help turning your current family dynamic around to a more connected, co-operative version — don’t hesitate to reach out. No matter where you are, or what style of parenting you’ve been using up to now, we can get you on a better feeling course faster than you’d believe possible. Contact me and let’s set up a complimentary consultation to discuss your situation right away.

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Be well.