Episode 80: Getting Your Kids to Actually Listen and Do What You Ask.

If you have ever felt like you want to pull your hair out of your head cuz your kids just Will Not Listen… we are speaking YOUR language!!

As much as you want your kids to just be ok, to grow up happy & healthy, when it comes down to day to day parenting it can be really tough to just roll with the struggles, especially when on top of everything else you can’t get them to help out. 

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This week we are diving into what doesn’t work, and what will get their attention and their cooperation. 

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Transcript

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Hey there and welcome back to the peaceful home podcast. My name is Pam, and today we're talking all about how to talk so your kids will listen. I E getting your kids to do what you ask them to do when you ask them to do it. This is a challenge for a lot of us as parents. And we are breaking it down today and getting exactly what you need to do as the parent to get them to respond the way that you need them. Or would like them to respond. So let's dive in. Now the parenting journey is exactly that it's a journey. It's like a big adventurous road trip, and sometimes things are smooth and there's no traffic and there's no storms. And sometimes you hit rain and sometimes you have blizzards and you're stuck in snowdrifts. These things happen on our long journey of parenting. And. Sometimes it's hard to know. What to do at what stage and how to interact and what to say to your kids or what to not say to your kids, because we now have a better understanding of what our kids need from a neurological perspective. Because we've done the research. We understand the impact that our actions as parents have on our kids. And it's not just something that I experienced where I go, oh, Hey, I didn't like this thing in childhood. And so I'm not going to do it for my kids. It's like we read research. We have an understanding of the negative impacts that first and foremost ignoring feelings has on our kids. We know what it felt like for us. But now we know research says it's a, no-no, it's something that we just need to stop doing. In other words, we need to start listening to how they're feeling. We need to start tuning into those experiences. If we want them to listen to us. Because like in any relationship, the road goes both ways and you wouldn't want to spend time with somebody that only takes from you where they want advice. They. Want your support, but they're not willing to give any in return. And that's not what your relationship with your kids should look like either it's a two-way street, which means if you want them to listen. You have to listen to. That's just the way that it goes. So this is very first step. This first thing. As we've got to deal with the kids. Feelings. And one of the things that we struggle with, because most of us did not learn this firsthand in our own childhood. Is learning how to validate versus invalidate their emotional experience. And I've talked about this before. But from a, this is from the perspective of if you want your kids to actually listen to you. You need to stop invalidating them. And more specifically, you need to stop invalidating the way that they're feeling. What does invalidation look like? They fall off their bike, and you tell them they're fine. And to get back up and brush it off. They have a conflict with a friend and you say, oh, it's not really that big of a deal. You and your friend have this conflict all the time. It'll be fine tomorrow. Anything that sends your kid. The message. What you're feeling is not accurate is not true or is not important. Is invalidation. Whether you tell them they're okay. Have you ever done this? You're okay. You're fine. Brush it off or they tell you that they're feeling something and you say that's not how you really feel. Or they're saying that they don't want to hug their uncle or their aunt. The holidays and you say you're going to make them feel sad. So do it anyway. All of that is invalidation. And now you might be thinking I grew up with that and I turned out okay. While I understand the sentiment and believe me, I get this all the time. This is the number one complaint I get from parents like that was my story. And I turned out fine. What I'm asking you to do. Is to just be open to another way. When you say something like. That was my experience. And I turned out fine. What you're telling your subconscious mind is there's no need to change. I'm not willing to do things differently. And that's a fixed mindset. That means you're not going or growing anywhere. And if you truly want to make sure that your kids are okay to help them out to support them in their journey. You have to be willing to grow with them. And I certainly get that. That's not what was modeled for us for most of us as kids. We did not grow up in households where our parents were like, I'm growing with you. Growth is so important. It was like, I'm the adult, you're the kid. You do what I say? And while, yes, I do believe that. As grownups we gain wisdom and we can share this wisdom. At the end of the day, when we close the door on growth. We stop accumulating wisdom and actually the wisdom that we have starts to. Fall apart. And so you're no longer offering wisdom, you're offering judgements and lectures. So maybe you found yourself in this dynamic. And like I said, I get it. What I'm asking you to do here is just be open to a different perspective and recognize that we now understand how the brain works. We didn't understand how the brain worked even 20 years ago. We understand now, so this opportunity to do things differently. Okay. So the very first step that we have to do here is we have to give. Your kids feelings, your full attention. That means when they're experiencing. Uncomfortable emotion. You have to put down your phone, remove your computer. Stop cooking dinner, whatever it is that you're doing. So folding laundry and attune to them. Be there for them. This is not going to last forever. You may be sacrificing. And I say, sacrificing in an air quote kind of way. You may be sacrificing two minutes of your time. It's not going to take forever when you stop resisting it. Cause that. Which you resist persists. So we just give full attention to the emotion. You acknowledge it verbally. That's step number two, you just say, okay. Yeah, I hear you. I see what you're saying. That makes sense to me. It gives you this space to just simply small verbal comments, small verbal sounds, even you're just letting them know that you're there and you're tuned in. Step number three is to help them. To give what they're experiencing a name. This is the naming, the feelings thing. And you can do some educating here. There's lots of feelings, charts out there. But just getting really simple and straightforward. Are they feeling sad? Angry, overwhelmed, frustrated. Are they feeling hurt? What is it that they're experiencing and that you just help them put a name to it. It seems like you're really frustrated about this. It seems like you're really angry about this. It seems that was really hurtful. When your friend said those things to you, right? All we're doing is putting a name on it as your child ages. And as you do this work more, you might ask them. What are you feeling right now? What emotion are you feeling right now? And see if they can start to label it themselves. Because again, this is a teaching process. Now I don't care if you've got a 17 year old that you've never done this with it's going, it doesn't matter. It's not about their chronological age. What about their experience with this practice? So you're naming it. You're putting a name to how they're feeling. And number four is you give them this opportunity to experience. The thing that they desire. In a wishful or dream full. And exaggerated way. So for instance, if your kid doesn't want to go to bed, maybe they want to play up, stay up and play video games all night and you say, I get it. Of course you want to stay up and play video games all night. It seems like you're really having a great time with your friends online. And you really have been working really hard at this video game. And you would love to be able to just pull an all-nighter and play the video game all night. And. This is the part where we shift directions and shift focus. You've got school tomorrow. That's probably not feasible. Or with your younger kid, there wants to play with their toys. And we had this happen in my house when Marley was little where it'd be like, okay, it's bedtime. This is why giving them, pre this thing's coming is helpful. But okay. It's bedtime. And no, I don't want to go to bed. I don't want to clean up my toys. I just want to build these Legos or I just want to play with this thing. And we have a conversation about yeah. It seems like you're having a lot of fun. I can see why he would want to stay up all night and just do that and play and play and play or build and build a, but can you imagine what you could build? If you stayed up all night with your Legos and just kept building and building from your imagination, could you imagine. What crazy huge things that you could come up with. What you're doing is you're making a statement that allows them to say yes, and you do this a couple of times. So you start with one and you get them to say yes, and then you expand it a little of course. Wouldn't you love to just stay up all night building Legos? Yes, that'd be so great. I know. Could you imagine how big the castle that you're building right now could be if you literally just built for the next eight hours? Whoa, that would be crazy. Can you also imagine how tired you would be? Oh, yes. I can imagine how tired I would be. Okay. So that means in the ear, you don't even, oftentimes with most kids, you don't even have to move them to that place. All they want is to feel heard. All they want is for you to indulge in the thing that they want to, the feeling that they're having. It doesn't matter what it is. So that's the first piece is like dealing with their feelings, letting them feel, acknowledging and validating their feelings and then play with that. Let them be a little bit more expansive with that. What would you do if you had that time? What would it be like? Do you think if you had ice cream for dinner every night for a week? What do you think that would be like. Oh, it'd be so amazing. Yeah, ice cream. Sure does taste good. I love ice cream too. And you might be thinking. Sure. Pam. Okay. So when they're experiencing emotions, when they're having a feeling like I don't want to go to bed and they're upset about it, or maybe they've had a conflict with a friend and they're upset about it and I walk them through this process. That's great. But what about when there's really actually an issue? When there's a behavior or something that I need them to stop doing or get them to change something. Maybe they're not treating their sibling. The way that you would like them to be treating their sibling, maybe they're. Played with something of yours or pulled out something of yours and broke it and you need to address it. I have a process for that too. And holy cow, that's where we're going next. So perfect. So in this scenario where there's an issue where there's actually a behavioral, an attitude issue, something that you need to address by the way, I am a firm believer that when your child is having an attitude, what we call an attitude, right? When your child is experiencing an emotion that comes out as an attitude, it's simply an emotion. And so refer to the first part, dealing with your kids' feelings, the second part of dealing. With behaviors or difficulty. Is that. This is a really simple strategy to follow here that allows you to not fall into judgment because that's one of the things that happens when our kids do something, when they break something and they treat somebody poorly. When they're reacting in a way that we don't want them to be reacting and maybe they start to trigger us. We have a tendency. To judge, or do you use guilt to get them to extinguish the behavior, but instead your job as a teacher is to simply enlighten them and help them see what's happening. So what you're doing in this exercise is you're simply highlighting imagine that you literally have a highlighter marker and you're just highlighting stuff so that they can see it. So they can start to draw their own conclusions. This is how you get kids that are great at decision-making and they can take in all the information and see which direction to go. So the very first thing that you need to do is you need to understand that the goal here is to provide information instead of feedback. You're not saying this is bad because of this thing. You're just simply observing what you saw and you're reporting on it. You're just simply describing what you see. I noticed that you and your brother were arguing, and then I heard you. Raise your voice. I'm just providing information. This was my observation of things. I'm not saying it was bad that you raised your voice. I'm saying I heard the volume on your voice. Turn up. Step two is just to add additional information. So maybe the additional information here is I heard you and your brother arguing your volume increased. And then I heard him crying. So it seems like maybe he was hurt by whatever. Went on. Can you tell me about it? And that's step number three is we start to talk about feelings. We have this opportunity to say, I, it seems as though he was feeling hurt, he was feeling upset. He was feeling angry. He was having an experience. Can you tell me more about what went on? Or maybe you're talking about your own experience with something or. The child that you're talking to experience about something. So maybe they borrow a tool of yours. This happens in my house all the time and it's not my kid. It's my spouse. I have my very own toolkit because my husband has a tendency to take things out of said toolkit or any place. He's got a whole basement full of tools, but he takes my shit all the time and he'll use it and then put it places where it doesn't go and then nobody can find it. And this is not just with my tools. He does it with everything. So you're like, where are the scissors? And he's I don't know. And I'm like, you just had them and he's I don't know what I did with him. Or he'll find something. He was looking for a flashlight on Halloween. And we had, we have a million flashlights every year. We all get flashlights and our stockings, we all like. They have camping flashlights. We have so many flashlights in his house and we can never find a freaking flashlight when we need it because my husband grabs it to go look at something real quick and then miraculously disappears every single time. Every single time. And so the other day he was looking for his flashlight. And he was like, couldn't find it. It was Halloween found. Marley's flashlight. And then later on, he said, oh, I found my flashlight. It was in Marley's room. She had both of them like, okay, whatever, you probably put it in there. Which I'm sure is what happened because Marley doesn't, wouldn't be putting flashlights away in her room. Which is neither here nor there, but he finds the flashlight and then he takes it. And we have a drawer in the kitchen that I need to clean out, but it's got a bunch of pens and pencils in it and probably most of them don't work. And he jammed it in that drawer. And close the door. And I was like, what is the light now? All of the flashlights that we do know where they are or under the sink, they have a thing, a container under the sink where they go. What is the likelihood that he's going to find that flashlight in a drawer? Again, he's not going to, and he's going to ask me if I know where it is. And now you all know where the flashlight is. It's in the friggin pencil drawer. Anyway. In that scenario, I might say. Hey. I'm going to use my tools because literally I have a toolkit that's got, it's like one of those like 50 tools, tool kits. And I think he's got one screw, one little tiny screwdriver in it right now in like a wrench. I don't know where anything else is because he's taking it. I can't even find my damn hammer. And so when I bring it up or when I buy myself a new tool kit, which I'm sure I will for Christmas He will say, can I he'll start out this way? Can I use something out of your toolkit? And so what I would say in that scenario is last time you took the hammer out of my toolkit. You did not return it. And I say this now, when he asks where the hammer is, do you know where the hammer is? And I say, The last time I saw my hammer, it was in the toolkit. And then you took it out of the toolkit and used it. I don't know what you did with it. From there. And so then I'm going to talk about my feelings. I get really frustrated when. I go to try to find the hammer, to hang something up in my office or somewhere else in the house. And I can't find it. In the future. When you borrow my hammer, can you please put it back? And so that's the like, Talk about the way that I'm feeling and then make a request around it. And you might have a kid that leaves their dirty socks in the middle of the living room floor. I have one of those two. And so I could say, Hey, I noticed that we have this conversation about your socks the other day. And I just walked into the TV room and I noticed that your socks are on the floor in there. And her response is yes. And I'm like, okay, so you know that they're there. Yes. I know that they're there. Okay. Great. Now I might not say anything about my feelings in the Sox situation, but when she leaves her doc Martins in the middle of the living room floor, and I stub my toe on them. When it impacts me, then I will say, Hey. You doing this thing impacts me. This is how it impacts me. And I don't want to have this experience. It's not a judgment. It would be like, I'm leaving a wet towel on my bed when you leave a wet towel on my bed. In truth I don't really want to sleep in a wet cold bed. If you could grab your towel and hanging up in the bathroom, that would be great. There's my request. Now if you have younger kids, or if you have kids that need visual reminders, you can put a little signs like this is where the towels get hung up. Or this is where the shoes go. Or you get like a little mat or something to put the shoes on. You get a laundry basket for them. They're dirty closing. Now believe me. I understand. I have a teenager. And it's like laundry empty laundry basket. Dirty clothes on the floor. I get it right. And so it's funny. I was in a room this morning and it's like clean clothes piled on the floor. Laundry basket is the halfway clothes, like the jeans that I've worn. But I don't want to put in the laundry because I want to wear them again tomorrow. So they're in there. The sweatshirt that I've worn, but I don't wanna put in the laundry cause I want to work again tomorrow that goes in the laundry basket. That's within the laundry basket and the dirty clothes are like on the floor over by behind her door. I'm like, okay well, you've got. System clearly, but can we. Can we move this along because this isn't working. For me. So it's okay to address these things. It's okay to have conversations and say, Hey, this is my expectation. This is what I need from you. And as a matter of fact, you can't get your kids to do anything. If you don't. Give them expectations with you. Don't let them know, Hey, this is what I expect, or this is what I need from you. You can always use strategies like exaggeration. You can always use tools. We live in a timeframe where. What your kids are currently doing regardless of where they are right in this moment. Whatever they're doing is holding their attention. Maybe they're on a device. Maybe they're watching TV or playing a video game, or they're talking to somebody they're doing something that is not the thing that you're asking them to do. Your asking them to disrupt those neural pathways into shift their focus onto something else. And we do this. Hey, can you empty the dishwasher? And they don't respond right away. Or, Hey, can you clean up your clothes? And they don't respond right away. And then we start going, did you hear me? I asked you to clean up your clothes. What is going on here? Why are you acting like this? Why aren't you doing the things that I'm asking you to do? Then we become dysregulated because they don't react right away. But really all that's happening is you have to disrupt. The neural pathways, the connections that are happening in that moment. And here are my three favorite secret tips to get your kids to listen. The first is stop yelling from room to room. You tell your kids to stop doing it. It's annoying. It's irritating. When you yell from the other side of the house, making a request of them. You're not seeing them. They can't see you. You don't know if they clearly heard you and then you have an expectation that I set it. So why aren't they doing it? This just creates more turmoil and more conflict between you and your child further eroding the relationship. And honestly, the reason your kids listen, the reason that they respond. When you talk is because of the relationship. All they want is a relationship with you. That is their primary. That is their most important thing. And when you're yelling from room to room, you're not facilitating a connected relationship. You're facilitating dominance. And you're teaching them a bad habit. So when you want to talk to your kid or anyone in your family, anyone in your household. Either move yourself to where they are. Or make a request for them to come to you either is fine. And with our older kids are our kids that are on devices. It's fine to send them a text message, this is the world we live in. You say Hey, can you come in here? I have a question for you. Or I have a request for you, or, Hey, can you come in here for a minute? And when you do that, here's the other thing, especially as our kids get older, our kids are sophisticated. Way more sophisticated than we were right at their age. And when you only send them a message to say, Hey, can you come in here? And it's to ask them to do a chore, ask them to take care of something, or ask them to do something for you. They're going to be like, they're going to start dragging their feet. They're going to start dragging their feet when you, so instead mix it up with other things. Hey, I bought this thing at the store for you, and I want to tell you about it. Hey, what do you think of this thing? Grandma's asking about, your Christmas list and I just pulled this up and thought that was something you might like. Hey, did you hug me when you came home? Give me a hug and you stand up and you give them a hug. You. But you're facilitating, not just requests, not just, you're not just handing out orders. You're actually. Building deeper connection. And we do that by being in the same room. Number two, is that in order to get them to do what you ask them to do, you have to get them to shift, focus. So stop trying to give them directions when they're focused on their screen or when they're playing a video game or, and they sit and they're like yeah, I'm listening. Oh, go ahead. And they're on their video game, playing whatever. And they're completely not listening to you or maybe they are, but you don't feel as though they're listening to you. Stop doing that. Get their attention instead, make a request and say, Hey, I want to talk to you for a minute. Let me know when you're ready. Let me know when you can pause. I understand this is your screen time and you're playing on your video games for the next half hour. If you could just pause for a moment when you have a chance, let me know. I wanna chat with you for a minute. And then move from that place. Sometimes it's as simple as they pause and they look up and they're like, what's up. And you're like, so on your list today is the dishwasher and putting away your laundry. I'm like, okay. And then you just simply say, when do you, can you give me an idea of when you plan to do that so that I can support you? You're not asking them to go do it right now. You're not asking them to put down what they're doing. Oftentimes, this will result in what time is it? Oh, it's you know, two 30. Okay. So it's two 30 and I have half an hour more screen time. So when I'm done with this at three o'clock, when the alarm goes off, then I will go. And empty the dishwasher and then I'll head upstairs and put away my laundry. And then you just go, okay. Thanks. Number three. Here it is. Number three is demonstrate, appreciation. I'm not asking you to S Do skywriting and do back flips because they empty the dishwasher. And I'm not, I'm also not asking you to say, Hey, thanks. I'm asking you to demonstrate genuine appreciation. Hey, I really appreciate you helping out. In the kitchen. I really appreciate you getting that set so that I could cook dinner. I really appreciate you taking the time out of playing your game with your friends. To talk to me for two minutes. It doesn't matter what it is. And it doesn't matter if it seems big or small. Demonstrate appreciation. It goes a long way because what you're doing here is you're building the foundation of a deep, connected relationship, because that is the way that your kids are going to listen to you. And they're going to do what you ask them to do. And your job is to communicate to talk. And communicate to them in a way that supports. Their needs and their growth. It is not their job. To make your life easier. It's not. And if you're like, parenting is really hard. And that's a struggle and it's complicated, then stay tuned for my next podcast episode, because we are, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about how to simplify parenting. So thank you guys for being here. I appreciate you so much for tuning in. If you have a minute and you liked this episode, please leave a review on apple podcast. Share it with other moms who might be struggling with the same thing. Because together. We can help our kids grow happy, healthy, and resilient. We can make sure that they're all okay. Thank you again. And I look forward to seeing you guys next time. Take care.