articles

How to Make It Easier For Our Kids to Do the Right Thing

By Noël Janis-Norton June 2, 2015
In our past two columns, we’ve been sharing key strategies that motivate kids to want to do what we ask them to do. This month we’ll expand on the cooperation theme by adding another technique to your parenting toolkit that makes it much easier for our kids to do the right thing.

As parents we always want to be Preparing for Success. This is the second skill we teach parents in the Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting program. Preparing for Success is about being proactive, not reactive. Being proactive means thinking about what’s gone wrong in the past, anticipating what might go wrong in the future and then being willing to do something different so that things are more likely to go right the next time. 

Being reactive, on the other hand, means waiting until things go wrong and then reacting in ways that don’t actually help our children want to cooperate or do the right thing – reprimanding, lecturing, repeating and yelling.

One important way we can Prepare for Success is to put some time, thought and action into preparing our children’s environment. What I mean by this is that we can arrange the physical environment so that there are fewer temptations to misbehave and more opportunities for them to do the right thing. For example, when we put hooks low enough for our kids to hang up their own jackets, or when we bring games along in the car to occupy our kids on long car rides, we are preparing the environment.

Here are some other ways families have prepared the environment:
  • To prevent arguments about dressing warmly enough in winter, remove all summer clothes from your child’s closet.
  • At mealtimes, seat siblings at diagonal corners so that they can’t easily poke or kick one another.
  • Have labeled bins and uncluttered shelves so kids have easily accessible places for all their belongings. This makes clean-up easier and less daunting.
Just take a moment to reflect on what behavior is bothering you and then think about how you can rearrange things to make it easier for your child to do the right thing. It’s so easy to keep doing things the way we’ve always done them. We forget to think outside the box, as was the case with this family, whose morning routine needed tweaking:

“Our younger son is five and has just learned to tie his shoes. His fine-motor skills aren’t very well developed, so it takes him several minutes as well as his FULL attention to tie them. Our routine used to be that he put his shoes on after breakfast, but that was also when he and his older brother needed to brush teeth, comb hair, pack backpacks, etc. It’s a busy, noisy time of day and it was difficult for him to concentrate, especially with his brother there providing additional distraction. All he heard from us was ‘Come on, hurry up, we’ll be late for school!’ which didn’t motivate him at all. In fact, the nagging actually made him go slower. Our solution was to rearrange things and have him put his shoes on before breakfast while his brother was practicing the piano. The new plan worked like a dream, and the mornings are cheerful again. There’s no rushing, and it’s much calmer and happier for everyone. It was such a simple solution, but we just hadn’t taken the time to think about how we could rearrange things to help him succeed.”

This proactive Preparing for Success technique is a key way to avoid potential problems by putting simple things in place to make it easier for our kids to do things right. As a result, we will have so much more that we can Descriptively Praise! Our kids will be calmer and happier and so will we.

Do you have a question for Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting? If so, email us at info@calmerparenting.com. And for parenting tips, you can sign up for our newsletter and follow Noël on Twitter @calmerparenting.