Silence is golden

Here’s my parenting tip of the day: (How do I put this gently?) Shut up before you blow it. If you can control your natural affinity for making a point, you can better run your household.

Here’s what I mean. We all believe our children will understand our motivations if we just talk about them long enough. Long, passionate lectures. We’re all experts at those. “Your room is a reflection of yourself. Make it sparkle.” “It’s disgusting to leave a half-eaten candy bar under your bed for three years.”

Rewind. Delete. Edit. Your children already stopped listening. You have to keep it simple.

“Clean your room or no phone tonight.” Short and to the point.

There are times for reasoning and explaining, but when it comes to the basic rules, you should only have to answer the question, "Why?" so many times.

Now, I’m no parenting expert. I’m just a parent who’s tried many techniques to make my teenager and toddler understand why my husband and I have rules. In the end, I’ve found that the only thing that matters is that we do have rules and they have to be followed.

Your children are like lawyers looking for loopholes. The more you talk, the more they’ll find.

When my eldest daughter was 3 years old, she fought me on getting dressed for preschool every morning. When I say fought, I mean she ran away, wriggled, wiggled, cried, yelled. I reasoned with her. “You can’t go out of the house naked, and I have to get to work on time.” More wriggling.

That’s it, I decided. I’m the parent here. I held her little arm still enough to pull on one sleeve of her Winnie the Pooh shirt. She pulled that sleeve off while I tried to get the other one on. Looking back now, it’s kind of funny. Oh wait, no it isn’t.

What ensued was a ridiculous wrestling match with a flailing, rubbery child who had more energy than I ever will. The end result: My daughter always ended up getting dressed, but I was always late for work in the process.

Then, I received one of those unexpected nuggets of information that seemed small at the time but which literally changed my life:

Step 1: Tell them what you want them to do.
Step 2: Tell them the natural consequence if they don’t do it.
Step 3: Let them incur the consequence. In other words, don’t chicken out.

This works on every stage, every age. In the situation I just outlined, here’s how it goes down:

My daughter refused to get dressed for preschool. I said, “We’re leaving the house at 7:30 a.m. whether you’re dressed or not.” I resolved myself to taking my little girl to preschool naked with her hair standing on end if that was her condition at the time of the big 7:30 deadline. It wasn’t easy. I have pride, after all.

At 7:30 that first day, my daughter was only half dressed and she hadn’t let me comb her hair. My heart pounded. My bluff was called.
As if nonplussed, I announced our departure. My adorable little 3 year old just stood there in her disheveled state. I scooped her up under my arm and took her out the door.

The next morning, my daughter didn’t fight quite as hard, but I’m sure she wasn’t polished walking out the front door. The next day, she believed me when I said we were leaving at 7:30 a.m. It got easier from there.

This method works even better once a child is old enough to be horrified by the idea of showing up at school with no pants on.

The reason this technique works is because it’s black and white. You can’t argue with black and white.

The reason this technique proves so difficult is because we like to talk and we like to have people listen when we talk. We want to believe that our children will be adequately reverent to our years of life experience. We see ourselves as …

Maybe I should just shut up now. I’ve said all I need to say.

By the way, check my Links section under "Effective discipline" for a story about consistent discipline techniques.