I have five kids. All under seven years old. No twins.
Needless to say it’s a busy around here. As every busy parent knows, getting your kids to do something you want often takes a tremendous amount of patience, strategy, and coordinated tactics.
Kind of like marketing.
Make it Fun
How many of kids are picky eaters? Just about all of them. Kids need to eat healthy food and often healthy food is exactly what they don’t want to eat. But by making it fun, kids are more apt to do it. Peanut butter sandwiches become butterflies, dinosaurs, and geometric shapes. Carrot stick swords. Bug eye olives. Make it fun and watch their pallet expand.
Scarcity
Sometimes you have to pull out the big guns and introduce some high-pressure sales tactics. Nothing moves a young child to get ready for bed like telling them the bed time story offer expires when, “I reach 10.”
“1…2…3…4…”
Limiting Options
Kids like options—just not too many options. When presenting a choice, give kids a few options to choose from rather than being open-ended. They’ll feel some control but won’t be paralized to the point of indecision.” Would you rather wear x or y?” will be better received and have a better outcome than, “What are you going to wear today?”
Lower the barrier to Entry
If you’re asking a child to perform a difficult task make it achievable—lower the barrier to entry. Take the contents of a dirty room, ‘bulldoze’ them into a pile, quickly sort toys, clothes, and books then ask your kid to take care of each pile. Suddenly a task with a high barrier-to-entry becomes achievable. Win-win.
Translating marketing tactics into raising children is effective and fun. Give it a try—I’d love to hear your ideas.
Photo by BigBoyDrums
Love it. I should try some of these tactics, see how they compare with my regular parenting skills: Violence, Passive-Aggressiveness, Manipulation, Dungeons…
I think in the past I would have agreed with all of this and I think there is a place for such tactics, however I have been reading an author (John Rosemond) who talks about the need for leadership in the family and a tough love “I said so” approach. It makes a lot of sense.
For instance his son was having problems in school so he sat him down and said it’s your job to do well in school – I’m not going to check up on you for one month, but in that same month you are essentially grounded. In one month I will check with your teacher. Nothing more was ever said – In one month’s time he checked with his teacher and his teacher said she had never seen such a dramatic turn-around.