Faith in Parenting

“No” is a word that, by necessity, our kids tend to hear quite often. Some recent examples from the Wolf house include:   “No, you can’t eat chocolate chips at 9:00 in the morning,” “No, you can’t bring all of your Webkinz into school for Show and Tell,” “No, you can not bring your Gameboy on the school bus,” and “No, you can not stay up late tonight, even if you’re on the most exciting chapter!”

So how can we mix it up so that our kids don’t tune us out entirely when they hear “no” yet another time?

In addition to the Plain Old “No,” here are four different ways of saying “No” to our kids:

1. No with a redirect - For example, “No, let’s play a game/read a book/play outside instead.”
2. No with an explanation - “No, we’re not going to rent that movie because some of the jokes aren’t appropriate for kids.”
3. No with a compromise - “No, but you’re welcome to invite your friends over here to play ‘E’ games.”
4. No with added responsibility - “Not at this time. If you’re really serious about this, though, I’d like to see you work toward it by… (taking care of your hamster…doing your chores without being asked…etc.)”

These are just a few ideas for mixing up the manner in which we say “No” to our kids. And remember, upholding our boundaries as parents is really important. Our kids need to hear “No,” so this message is not about dumbing down our limits. But the more we can involve our kids in the process, the more they can feel “heard” by us, which is one more step in equipping them to listen and meet our expectations -and that, after all, is the goal.

For more tips on dealing with this issue, visit the “Tuesdays at 2:00″ support call archive and listen to the audio recording of our discussion.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 11:19 pm and is filed under parenting, children. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.