No Means No - How To Teach Your Child That You Mean Business

[Mom-Online]

I think a lot of parents feel it’s important to explain their reasoning to their children in an attempt to get them to understand. Realize that along the way, wanting your child to understand can easily shift into wanting their approval, or their acceptance of your reasons.

When this happens, parents can get stuck in a dynamic where they're over-explaining things to their children. I personally think that once you’ve given your child a reasonable amount of input, any further explanation defeats the purpose.

Have you fallen into the habit of over-explaining & over-negotiating with your kids? If so, it’s likely that every time your child wants to challenge your authority, decision, or rule, you keep talking to him in order to get him to understand why you’ve made the rule in the first place.

And often as your child gets older, you'll find yourself compromising some more and changing the rules a little more. Understand that what you’re really doing is training your child not to accept the rules. Don’t forget, if you tell your child “No, you can’t do that now,” and he keeps bugging you—and then you end up giving in and letting him do it—you’ve just trained him not to listen to you.

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