3 Simple Steps To Get Your Child Listen To You

“One of the biggest sources of frustration for parents is when children don’t listen,” says Turgeon.

“Your toddler goes stiff as a board when you try to put her into the buggy or, despite your daily instruction to ‘be nice to your brother’, your daughter still provokes and teases him until they both end up in tears.

“These are moments when all you want is some control and sanity. You just want your words to work.”

Here are the three steps they say are more likely to make young children listen without parents having to shout or threaten them:

To illustrate how to attune with children, Wright and Turgeon use the example of a mum being ignored when she told her children to stop rowing over who took the serving spoon first at dinner. A spoon tug-of-war ensued, and the spoon, and pasta sauce, ended up on the floor.

The mum was immediately irritated when her children started rowing, and she focused on making the behaviour stop, rather than on helping the kids deal with it properly themselves.

To attune with her children, the mum could have lowered her body to their level and described what she saw, a bit like a commentator, asked a question to understand better, or helped the kids listen to each other.

If her kids didn’t stop the spoon tug-of-war, she could say: ‘I’m taking the spoon for a moment because I can see it might go flying. Now talk to me – what’s going on?’

The idea is that although the children might still be angry at each other, the mother’s non-judgemental questions would give them a chance to practise conflict resolution.

Wright says: “It’s normal to get upset when children aren’t listening. The problem is that when you jump into the ring, your child’s defences go up and her brain goes into fight-or-flight mode. Either she’ll become more adversarial or she’ll squash her ideas because you’ve scared her.

“Meeting her with attunement is the way to engage cooperation. If you approach with a sense that you’re trying to understand and be helpful, and not just order her around, her defences are lowered. Now you can work together.”

If there’s a limit or reality that applies to the situation, tell your child, and give a brief reason. For example, this could be ‘We have to leave the playground now because it’s getting dark.’

Wright and Turgeon say the limit needs to be clear and factual, and parents should avoid asking a question or just saying ‘no’.

Instead, parents should say what they do want, and what the child can do.

“Avoid using a harsh tone,” advises Turgeon. “Instead, keep your voice calm and informative. It can feel like a constant battle between us and them, but they are meant to test things and, depending on a child’s temperament, it might take one hundred times of testing a limit or hearing a rule before each of the ‘experiments’ is over.”