A Parent's Secret Weapon for Better Listening with Less Nagging

How can we make it easier for our kids to cooperate the first time we ask? With this one-minute tool to help them remember the rules - no nagging, no arguing, and no reminders involved.

The Million Dollar Question is: How can we make it easier for our children to cooperate the first time we ask and to make it harder for them to forget or to ignore us or to argue back? Wouldn’t it be great if there were a technique that would help our children understand what they need to do, remember what they need to do, and actually do what they need to do, without reminders? A simple tool called a “think-through” is the key to achieving all of these goals.

A think-through maximizes the likelihood of your child cooperating by fixing the expectation or rule firmly in his long-term memory. But it is not a reminder.

When we’re reminding our children about what they should do and how they should do it, have you noticed that they’re usually not listening? When we tell our children what we want them to do, we hope that they take us seriously. But to kids, it sounds like another lecture — blah, blah, blah — and they easily tune us out.

When you use a think-through, it is not you but your child who is saying what he has to do. That shift has a powerful, positive impact on his memory and on his willingness to do it. Think-throughs are a highly effective technique for improving any habit. They are different from reminders in two important ways: They happen before the misbehavior occurs, and your child does the talking, not the parents.

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To finish reading the full story, visit the ADDitude Magazine website: http://bit.ly/2hAGGJE.