You may be wondering how do I get through to my stubborn child? Well you're not alone. There are a
lot of stubborn children out there and in this video we're going to be talking about stubborn
children and what you can do in not too much time to make a pretty big difference.
Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck. I teach parenting, good communication and family relationship development
all over the world through the lens of self-government and in this video we're
going to be talking about stubbornness, what that means and what we can do to try to help our child
choose to trust us instead of push back against everything we say they need to do. Years ago I
did treatment foster care for troubled teens. They were all between the ages of 12 and 18 and many
of them have oppositional defiant disorder, sometimes there were narcissists, bipolar,
ADHD. You know what all those things have in common? People with those types of processing challenges
seem very stubborn. Not only that but all of my children, I have four of my own children were
all strong-willed but lucky for me, I also was a pretty stubborn little girl and definitely
teen. My husband is also pretty stubborn so we're pretty used to strong-willed people.
So, what do we do to help a strong-willed person decide that they don't have to be right all the
time? Well, one of the biggest things that we need to do is help the person understand
that being able to say okay to somebody else and not have to control everybody else is
actually real power and real control. You see a person who's stubborn thinks that they have
to prove that they are right. They don't understand that they don't have to fight
every single thing out. But they don't and if you explain to them do you know that when you just
choose to be okay about something and just say okay even if you know the other person's wrong,
let them learn from their mistake that you are actually at that point exercising more power
than if you're trying to control them all the time because they won't respect you. But if you allow
a person to make their own mistake and then they come to you for advice because you don't make the
same mistakes, then that person respects you and they actually will listen to what you have to say.
It's a totally different paradigm if you understand it in that way. People sometimes
have to have the freedom to fail or to do things in a way that isn't right in order to determine
that the way right is actually that correct path for them. So, let's talk about stubbornness. When
people are stubborn, they usually feel a bit of an OCD about having to be right about everything. They
definitely do not like to hear if they've done something wrong, they oftentimes have a hard time
accepting any kind of consequences or correction from people and will oftentimes fight back when
it's time to receive a correction. So, this is common and it doesn't infect just children but
there are many adults who also would be considered very stubborn. They just don't want to learn from
anybody else except for themselves. It is kind of an egotistical or sometimes even narcissistic type
of a mindset however, not every person who has just good old-fashioned stubbornness or strong wildness
is necessarily egotistical or narcissistic. They could just have a bad habit. The habit
is not trusting other people. We could explore at length why this bad habit exists. Some people
come from family environments where they truly couldn't trust other people or their parents
are overly controlling and they feel like that's not right so they want to be in control. There are
some people that have higher levels of anxiety so they feel a desire to control other people
socially or in whatever circumstance. So, depending on where your child's at, there could be different
reasons for why they're strong-willed or coming across as stubborn. But the answers to the problem
no matter what is leading to this stubbornness luckily are the same. We're going to talk about
what to do with this stubbornness but before I do, click that subscribe button. When you subscribe to
this channel then we can make more videos. We need to know people are watching so let me know by
clicking subscribe. Also don't forget to click the notification bell so that you can be notified when
new videos come out because they're coming out all the time. So, what do you do? No matter where the
stubbornness is coming from, what do you do? Well what I did for all of the foster children and for
my own children as well as for myself is I taught us self-government. So, what is self-government?
Self-government is a principle that means to understand the cause and effect of any given
situation and to possess a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them. This means
that a person has to understand that they actually are in control of them. Nobody else gets to control
them. Even a parent doesn't really control a child. A parent may sometimes coerce a child or even
seem like they force a child to do something but the child ultimately has control about how they
process it and take it. So, it's important for your child to understand that their thoughts are their
own and that they get to always have that control and then if they understand that about themselves,
hopefully they can also appreciate that everybody else gets to make their own thoughts and decisions
too so they should not spend their time trying to be in control of everything around them. There are
certain skills that I teach children and that I've learned myself so that I can be more successful
and self-governing. These skills I call the four basic skills. They are following instructions,
accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately.
I hope you notice that pretty much all four of those things are things that people who are truly
stubborn struggle with. So, if we can teach a person how to follow instructions when they don't want to,
that they have an option to stay calm and say okay or disagree appropriately, this can be liberating
for them. In fact that disagree appropriately skill is going to be one that you're going to
want to work with them on again and again. If they can learn a new way to communicate without just
standing on a wall and trying to fight everything out and if their fights don't work anymore because
you're not going to be fighting it out because you're not power struggling anymore then guess
what happens to the stubbornness? It becomes ineffective and soon is not utilized. So, teaching
those four basic skills will teach children how to do things like keep a calm face, voice and body,
to drop the subject, to do a consequence, to check back and show accountability and responsibility,
to seek to understand other people's point of view before sharing their point of view. These are very
mature skills that truly are transformational for a person. So, learning those four basic skills is
going to be a big thing that's going to help your child be able to transition from having to die on
every single wall. So, this leads me to a really important part of parenting a strong-willed or
stubborn child and that is we can't fight with them. We can't. So when I took in these treatment
children into my home, the foster children that came to my home for many years, I knew I was not
going to fight with any of them. Number one, I couldn't lay hands on one of them. They didn't
belong to me and I had to answer to the courts for everything that happened in our home. So, I had to
have a way to be firm and to help them learn cause and effect but to make the decisions themselves.
This meant that I had to have ways to correct the children and to bring those youth to
calmness when they were going out of control that involved not touching them or controlling them.
In fact, I teach all of those skills to self-government in my teaching self-government
parenting course. It's called the TSG parenting course and it's on teachingselfgovernment.com
so you can see that. One of the biggest things I had to teach myself in order to not power
struggle with these youth that were going to be power struggling all the time because they had
a habit of that from their homes was calmness. I had to create a habit of being calm no matter what.
So how do you become calm when you feel like you need to control the chaos that's going around you?
Well there are certain tools that I have for that. In fact I would like to share those tools with you
for free. I have something called a calm parenting toolkit and in the description
below this video, there is a link to that called parenting toolkit. It is called teachselfgov.com/
toolkit. If you click on the link right now, you can get the calm parenting toolkit for free. That calm
parenting tool kit is the best first start that you can make for helping your strong-willed or
stubborn child learn to control themselves because if you don't learn how to be calm when they aren't,
are they going to be able to learn it? Probably not. In order to teach your children self-government,
you need to learn self-government too but it is possible. In fact I am living proof of it so
click on the link to the call parenting toolkit today and I'll see you there.