I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parents and children
how to govern themselves which basically means
how to follow instructions, accept "no" answers, accept consequences, disagree
appropriately, how to obey. Parents you learn how to
obey themselves and self-govern themselves. And the children need to
learn how to obey their parents and themselves too. There are many
frustrated parents that ask me, "How to make kids
listen and obey?" That's what they say. And that's what we're going to talk
about in this video.
In order to learn self-government, there has to be a certain type of a tone
and a certain type of a structure. And one of the tone elements that we
don't use is force. So, the opposite of force is trust.
We have to trust that a person can choose to obey. Which actually means that
we can't make anyone obey. They have to decide
that they want to obey. Now, you could forcefully move
someone to a position where you've decided in their own head
that they are obeying. But if there is no will to be in that location or to do
that thing that you are making them do, then they
are technically not obeying you. In this video, we're
going to talk about the requirements for obedience.
We're going to talk about different skills that a person needs in order to
be able to obey and listen more properly.
And we're going to talk about how to correct the problems
if somebody does not listen or obey. And if you stay with me that far, we're
going to give you some other things too. So, what is obedience? Years ago, I was
asked to speak at a conference in Virginia. And they said, "Could you please
talk to us about obedience and how to help our
children obey?' And so, I thought, "Oh, yeah. Sure. I
understand obedience." Well, I thought for fun that i would
actually look up the definition of obedience.
So, I went to my favorite dictionary which is Webster's 1828 dictionary
and i looked up the word obedience. And it actually
said that a person cannot obey or have obedience unless they first
learn the law. If you don't know the law first
then when you make a decision that would go against the law, you're not
technically disobeying. You just made a bad decision.
One of the principles of self-government that I teach is a principle called
pre-teaching. Which means that you teach somebody ahead of time what they need to
do, what's expected of them and what the
positive and negative consequences will be
if they choose to do that thing that they're supposed to do
or if they choose not to. There are always
positive and negative consequences with every decision we make.
That's just sort of the laws of nature. We may not get to see those
negative or positive consequences immediately
but they're always there. And if we went back to analyze our decisions, we would
be able to see very clearly how our decisions led to these positive
and negative consequences. So, a big part of obedience
is understanding cause and effect. So, pre-teaching. Let's pre-teach our
children what they need to know ahead of time
so that they can properly listen to us and properly obey. So, we start with the
law and then we justly govern in our family
according to the law. So, what are some of the laws that you have in your family?
Do you have certain skills that the children need to learn or that you teach
them? Do you have certain principles that your
family follows? Or do you have family rules that are regulations or
standards that everybody follows in your family? Those are part of your
law. Those are the things that you need to be
constantly teaching ahead of time. When you have to correct something because it
didn't go right, you've got to teach them cause and effect,
then you're going to have to go back to more teaching moments.
That spirit of pre-teaching should be in every communication
that you have with your children. They will learn from you better if you're
constantly paving the way for them to do the things that they need to do to
find happiness and to help unify with the family in the
relationships and the tasks that need to be done.
Pre-teaching is a tone element as well as a structural element.
So, when you pre-teach someone the law, you do it with this
tone or feeling of total trust that they can learn these skills,
they can learn these family rules or laws principles.
The things that you're teaching them and that they will follow through
properly. But it's also structural because if you're teaching them skills
in a really good way, those skills will have steps things that
they can hold on to so that you know where to fix the problems when they
occur in the future. In our family, we teach 4 basic skills.
These 4 basic skills take care of 99%
of all of the behavioral problems. And you can learn a lot about these 4
basic skills in my teaching self-government parenting
course which is on my website teachingselfgovernment.com.
But just to go into brief detail about these 4 skills,
they are following instructions, accepting no answers
and criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately. Each one
of these 4 basic skills has a skill set attached to it.
So, for instance, to follow an instruction, you look at the person,
keep a calm face voice and body. You say okay
or you ask to disagree appropriately which is another one of the skill sets
that we teach. And then you do the task immediately and
check back. If a person does not accomplish all
5 of those steps to following an instruction then they need to be
corrected. But this correction is done with the tone of acceptance,
a tone of love and a tone of peace. So, that the child cannot feel attacked
because they did something wrong so that there can be a feeling of unity.
I always tell people you should feel closer to your children during and after
a correction than you even did before. They should be
bonding moments. So, let's talk about correction.
If you're going to teach your children cause and effect then you have to praise
them when things go well and you have to
correct them when things do not go well or when they've made
the wrong choice. If you don't praise and correct
consistently, then your home will adopt a tone of manipulation.
So, that means that people will try to get away with whatever they can get away
with when somebody's not watching or when
somebody's worn out or doesn't care that day. This means that
parent diligence is vital in order to teach
your children how to listen to you and how to obey. So, part of listening to
you is being able to focus on what the
lesson is you're teaching. If you've pre-taught the person ahead of
time this is the skill this is the lesson, then when you get to
the correction step, you're reminding them of something
they've already learned before which means it's not very hard for them
to grasp on to. And so, that teaching moment becomes
much easier for them. In fact, it oftentimes feels
comfortable. That's the power of the pre-teaching that happens ahead of time.
So, how do you do a correction? In the teaching self-government
parenting program in our course that we teach,
we talk about seven steps for correcting. One of those steps, one of those
important steps is describing. So, instead of reacting at the beginning
of a correction, you should describe. This is what
happened and this is what should have happened.
There are other steps to that. And I'm not going to get into
all of them because we don't have time in this video. But
if you can remember to describe. Describing will keep you hopefully from
reacting and saying stuff like, "Why did you do that? What were you
thinking?" And some of those things that always makes the child say,
"I don't know." Because they really don't know
usually why they made that impulsive decision
which turned out to be something other people didn't like or was
even a bad decision because it was disobedient.
So, you must correct and consistently correct.
But the way that you correct, the tone that you
carry with you in that correction is probably the hardest part. Let's talk
about that. The tone that is the most productive for
correcting your children is a tone of connection. Which means that you look
in their eyes and you think of their potential and who
they are. And you actually bond to them in the moment where you're
telling them that there was something they did that
wasn't a right choice or was maybe disobedient.
And that they need to be making a different choice. And this
is what they earn from that. And when you go through the additional teaching
that you need to do to make sure that it doesn't happen again
in the future. It's all done with a spirit of connection
which is best done when looking in the eyes and looking into the heart
of the other person. It's also done with trust. Trusting that the person can
understand what you're teaching them and that they want to do better and they
want to do good. Also understanding. Let's take a little bit of time to
understand why a person why might have made the bad decision or the
mistake that they made. Instead of taking it personally, let's
understand. That doesn't mean we don't correct it
because we definitely still correct it. But we can correct it with a spirit of
understanding instead of a spirit of condemnation.
Probably one of the most important tone elements. In fact, I'm going to say it is.
The most important tone element that a parent can
master is calmness. If you want your children to
listen to you, if you want them to obey you,
you've got to be worth listening to. You've got to have that feeling of
truth with you. If you're out of control then you are being manipulative and they
feel it. You may not think you're being
manipulative but that's what it feels like to everybody else. It feels like
controlling. Someone's controlling. This also happens
if you back away or you're passive. You need to be calm.
This calmness is a type of an assertiveness that's pre-planned and
prepared ahead of time for the difficult situation before it
even comes. When I was a foster parent for
troubled teens, I had to master my calmness. Otherwise,
I would have just engaged in fights with them because i have a strong-willed
personality. So, I could fight if I really wanted to.
But i took that strong-willed nature that part of myself
and I turned it on myself and said, "How about you use your strong will Nicholeen
to control you. To really truly be able to be
calm in any situation?" That's what I did. That calmness is key.
If you are calm, they won't feel threatened by you. They'll
feel like you're safe to learn from. And that's a vital piece
for creating that environment where children will learn
and listen and obey. I want to give you a gift.
This gift is a calm parenting toolkit. In fact, if you go to a link
right below this video, it says Calm Parenting Toolkit.
If you click that link, you'll get the toolkit
for free. If you can master your calmness, you can master
anything. You can have the self-government that you need to teach
them self-government and control too. When you're asking the question,
"How do I get them to listen to me and to obey?"
What you're really asking is "How do I get them
to desire to control themselves?" Well, it starts with you being able to
control yourself too. The Calm Parenting Toolkit is going to give
you the calm tools you need to control
yourself and the calm tools you need to help them
be in control when they go out of control too. Click
.the link below.