The Most Common Reasons Children Don't Believe that We Mean What We Say

I once had a boss who would meet with me weekly. He was (and still is) a brilliant man full of creative and sophisticated ideas for how our program could serve children in need. It was my job to figure out how to take his ideas and translate them into real-life projects and programs. After each of our meetings, I would walk out of his office with a long list of things to do before our next meeting. The list usually included doing extensive searches of scholarly journals, calling national experts, and writing large funding proposals – all by the following week! At first, I used to leave the office with a sick and hopeless feeling, knowing that what he’d asked me to do would be absolutely impossible to accomplish by the next week, even if I took up permanent residence in my office and worked 24 hours a day. It only took a few weeks of this to learn, though, that my boss would forget three quarters of what he’d asked me to do and at our next meeting would follow-up on only a few of the tasks he’d given me. Once I figured out how to tell which of his ideas he was serious about, I’d ignore the rest and only work on the important ones.

Our children are like me in the story above. They quickly learn to ignore us when we don’t follow up with something we’ve asked them to do. In fact, we actively teach our children not to do what we say when we fail to follow through. If we tell them we want them to clean their room, and then don’t check that they’ve done it or introduce some sort of consequence when they don’t, they’ll conclude that we didn’t really mean it in the first place and save themselves the trouble.

I was visiting a friend recently and we were sitting in her kitchen catching up over a few cups of coffee. My friend called into the other room where her children were playing video games and told them that it was time to do their homework. Ten minutes later, we could still hear the children in the other room laughing and playing their game. My friend yelled at them again to start their homework. We got involved in a discussion about what our group of good friends from college was doing now, and it wasn’t until another 20 minutes had passed that we realized that my friend’s children were still in the den playing video games. The children had obviously concluded that their mother wasn’t really serious about what she had asked them to do. They would have drawn a very different conclusion if my friend had walked into the den, turned the TV off, and watched over them as they marched to their rooms to do their homework.

Why do we so often send the message to our children that we don’t really mean what we say? Why don’t we follow through on our directives to them and why don’t we follow up with a consequence if they don’t do what we ask? I think this happens for the following reasons:
1. We don’t know how to do it effectively
2. We’re too tired
3. We’re afraid of their emotional reaction if we do
4. We feel guilty

Some parents don’t know how to give effective commands to their children and follow them up with appropriate consequences. They often communicate with their children in indirect, vague ways or alternatively, in overly complicated ways. These same parents also don’t know how to respond to noncompliance with appropriate consequences. Much more on this in the next couple of posts.

Some parents know what to do, but are too tired to follow up. It takes energy to get up and walk into the other room, make sure our children are doing what we asked, and administer consequences if needed. Over the years, I’ve learned not to ask my children to do something if I know that I’m too tired to follow up. Most of the time, it can wait until I’m better rested.

Some parents are uncomfortable with conflict and avoid it at all costs. They would rather drop the issue than push it and have to deal with their child’s anger, upset, or a temper tantrum.

Some parents feel guilty about disciplining their children. I’ve seen this most often with working parents who feel that they spend so little time with their child and don’t want that time to be spent in a negative interaction.

These are all understandable reasons for not following through on things we ask our children to do, but unfortunately, they all end with our directly teaching our children that they don’t have to listen to us if they don’t want to.

Next Time: How to Communicate Effectively with your children