Avoid Whining and Motivate Kids With These Three Steps Instead
Kids do crazy things and sometimes it’s easily frustrating. However, if you want to change your child’s behavior, you can try working with him, not against him, and Peter Bregman of the Harvard Business Review offers a three-step plan for that.
When someone does something that upsets us, we usually respond by accusing them and saying that something needs to be changed. This is a fairly common parenting scenario , but it may not be the best solution for strong discipline.
Bregman gives a personal example in which his daughter falls into the sand everywhere, and he loses his cool.
I need a better way to answer my daughter. To do this, I turned to my wife Eleanor, who is truly a master. I asked her how I should have dealt with this.
“Honey,” she said, playing the role of me in a conversation with my daughter, “there is a lot of sand here, and we need to clear it before it destroys the floors, how can I help?”
Simple and effective:
- Define the problem
- Indicate what should happen
- Offer to help
By using this method, you are not blaming or nagging , but explaining and proposing a solution that, as Bregman points out, is much more effective. He discusses how this works in relationships with other people, but he uses parenting as a prime example, and I think it is most useful in this context.
To learn more about why it works, and how it works in other ways, check out Bregman’s full post at the link below.
A Simple Formula To Change Our Behavior | Harvard Business Review