Tips To Deal With Stubborn Children
You may have a stubborn baby who refuses to stay in her crib or brushes aside her cereal spoon every time you try to feed her. Or you may have a bullheaded six-year-old who insists on wearing the same clothes every day and stomps his foot to defy every rule or instruction you give him. Here are ten tips that you can rely on to curb their stubborn behavior.
1. Listen, Don’t Argue
Communication is a two-way street. If you want your obstinate kid to listen to you, you have to be willing to listen to him first. Strong-willed children may have strong opinions and tend to argue.
They may become defiant if they feel that they aren’t being heard. Most of the times, when your child insists on doing or not doing something, listening to them and having an open conversation about what’s bothering them can do the trick. So how do you teach a five-year-old stubborn child to listen to you? You approach him or her sideways, in a calm and practical manner and not head-on.
2. Connect With Them, Don’t Force Them
When you force kids into something, they tend to rebel and do everything they should not. The term that best defines this behavior is counterwill, which is a common trait of stubborn children. Counterwill is instinctive and is not restricted to children alone. Connect with your children.
For example, forcing your six-year-old child, who insists on watching TV past her bedtime, will not help. Instead, sit with her and show interest in what she is watching. When you show you care, she is likely to respond. Children who connect with their parents or caregivers want to cooperate. Establishing an unshakable connection with defiant children makes it easier to deal with them, says Susan Stiffelman in her book Parenting Without Power Struggles.
Take that first step of connecting with your kid today – give them a hug! (2)
3. Give Them Options
Kids have a mind of their own and don’t always like being told what to do. Tell your four-year-old stubborn child that she has to be in bed by 9pm, and all you will get from her is a loud “No!”. Tell your five-year-old stubborn boy to buy a toy you chose and he will NOT want that. Give your kids options and not directives. Instead of telling her to go to bed, ask her if she would want to read bedtime story A or B.
Your kid could continue to be defiant and say, “I am not going to bed!”. When that happens, stay calm and tell her matter-of-factly, “well, that was not one of the choices”. You can repeat the same thing as many times as needed, and as calmly as possible. When you sound like a broken record, your child is likely to give in.
That said, too many options aren’t good either. For example, asking your kid to pick one outfit from his wardrobe could leave him confused. You can avoid this problem by minimizing the options to two or three outfits picked by you, and asking your stubborn toddler to pick from those.
4. Stay Calm
Yelling at a defiant, screaming kid will turn an ordinary conversation between a parent and a child into a shouting match. Your child might take your response as an invitation to a verbal combat. This will only make things worse. It is up to you to steer the conversation to a practical conclusion as you are the adult. Help your child understand the need to do something or behave in a specific manner.
Do what it takes to stay calm – meditate, exercise, or listen to music. Listen to soothing music, play calming or relaxing music at home so that even your kids can listen. Once in a while, play your kid’s favorite music. That way, you can gain their ‘vote’ and also enable them to unwind.
[ Read: Tips To Deal With Child Tantrums ]
5. Respect Them
If you want your children to respect you and your decisions, you need to respect them. Your child will not accept authority if you force it onto him. Here are a few ways you can model respect in your relationship:
- Seek cooperation, don’t insist on adherence to directives.
- Have consistent rules for all your children and do not be lax just because you find it convenient.
- Empathize with them – never dismiss their feelings or ideas.
- Let your children do what they can for themselves, avoid the temptation to do something for them, to reduce their burden. This also tells them that you trust them.
- Say what you mean and do what you say.
Lead by example is the mantra you should follow here because your kids are observing you all the time, according to Betsy Brown Braun, the author of You’re Not The Boss Of Me.
6. Work With Them
Stubborn or strong willed children are highly sensitive to how you treat them. So be watchful of the tone, body-language, and vocabulary you use. When they become uncomfortable with your behavior, they do what they know best to protect themselves: they rebel, talk back, and display aggression.
- Changing the way you approach a stubborn child can change how they react to you. Rather than telling them what to do, partner with them.
- Use statements like “let’s do this…”, “how about we try that…” instead of “I want you to do … ”.
- Use fun activities to get your kids to do something. For example, if you want your stubborn kid to put his toys away, start doing it yourself and ask her to be your “special helper”.
- You could also time the activity and challenge the kid to put the toys away faster than you can. This is a sneaky trick that mostly works.
Remember that the purpose of working with your children is to become their friend.
7. Negotiate
Sometimes, it is necessary to negotiate with your children. It is common for kids to act out when they aren’t getting what they want. If you want them to listen to you, you need to know what’s stopping them from doing so.
- Start by asking a few questions like “What is bothering you?”, “ Is something the matter?”, or “Do you want anything?” to get them to talk about it. This tells them that you respect their wishes and are willing to consider them.
- Negotiation need not necessarily mean that you always give in to their demands. It’s all about being considerate and practical.
- For example, your child may not be willing to go to bed at the set hour. Rather than insisting, try and negotiate a bedtime that suits both of you.
8. Create A Congenial Environment At Home
Children learn through observation and experience (3). If they see their parents arguing all the time, they will learn to imitate that.
Marital discord between parents can lead to a stressful environment in the house, affecting the mood and behavior of the kids.
According to a study, marital discord may lead to social withdrawal and even aggression in children (4).
[ Read: How To Control Your Anger With Kids ]
9. Understand The Child’s Perspective
To better understand your stubborn kid’s behavior, try to look at the situation from their perspective.
Put yourself in your child’s shoes and try to imagine what they must be going through to behave in such a way. The more you know your kid, the better you can deal with their stubborn streak.
For example, if your child is not willing to do his homework, it is possible that he or she is overwhelmed by the task. If there is too much to do or if your child is not able to focus, you can help by breaking the homework into smaller tasks that can be completed in short time. You could include short, one or two-minute breaks between the tasks to make the activity less stressful for him.
10. Reinforce Positive Behavior
There will be times when you would not know what to do with stubborn children, to control their anger and aggressive behavior. But if you react without thought, you may develop a negative attitude towards the problem and even reinforce his negative behavior unwittingly.
For example, your kid may be saying “No!” to almost everything you say. Think about it – do you say “No” a lot? If yes, you are reinforcing negative behavior by example.
One way to change your stubborn kid’s negative responses is the “Yes” game, a clever strategy recommended by marriage and family therapist Susan Stiffelman.
When playing this game, your kid has to say “yes” or “no” to everything. Questions like “You love ice cream, don’t you?”, “Do you love playing with your toys?”, or “Do you want to see if your dinosaur f
loats in the bath tub tomorrow?” are likely to get a “Yes” from your child. The more your kid responds positively, the more he is likely to feel like he is being heard and appreciated.
Common Problems With A Stubborn Child
1. How To Potty Train A Stubborn Child?
Potty training is difficult as it is, but when you are dealing with a stubborn child, it can become a pain. You can potty train your three-year-old stubborn and aggressive toddler by:
- Talking about it.
- Explaining him how it is done.
- Making it fun – don’t get serious if your kid refuses to use the toilet.
Remember that a stubborn child may take longer to learn to use the toilet than an obedient one. It is important that you remain patient and work with your kid to help him reach the goal, rather than push him towards it.
2. How To Get A Stubborn Child To Eat?
Children tend to be very fussy when it comes to food. That said, you cannot always feed your kid what he or she wants. The best way to make sure your stubborn kids get what is good for them is to make dinner time fun.
- Use creative ways to present the food to your little one.
- Get them involved at the dinner table (ask them to set the table up, serve, etc.).
- Encourage them to try the food (just one bite) before rejecting it. Serve them small portions of everything and let them choose.
- Reward them with a dessert or treat if they finish their meal.
[ Read: Environmental Influences On Child Development ]
3. How to punish a stubborn child?
Children need rules and discipline. Your kids should know that there will be consequences, good or bad, for their actions.
Make sure that they are fully aware of the consequences of breaking the rules.
Consequences should be immediate, especially when you are dealing with toddlers so that they can connect their actions to the result. Time-outs, cutting down playtime, or TV time and assigning little chores can be a few ways to discipline the kid. You could also get creative with consequences, based on the problem.
Remember that the idea is not to punish the child, but make him realize that his behavior is wrong.
If you have other tips on how to handle a stubborn child and want to share your story with other mommies, feel free to use our comments section. We’d love to hear from you!
Never you treat children like slaves cos you’re leading to grave those who ought to care for you at your old age.
10 suggestions for raising godly children:
Most of the believers I know have a strong desire to raise their children to be godly – to be passionate followers of Christ.
Years ago, before I even had children, God laid on my heart to develop a plan for my fathering. Though at the time I didn’t put this on paper, over the years I have begun to write it down in an effort to encourage other parents to have a plan for their parenting in the area of spiritual development.
That plan was covered in previous posts – this is an expansion of that – but in addition to having a plan, we thought through as a couple actions which could help attain our plan for parenting.
You can have the best plan in the world but with no steps to implement them they will just be pretty words on paper. That’s true in every area of our life, including parenting.
One of the things we wanted to see was our children following after Christ. We wanted to instill godly principles in their life. These are some specific suggestions we thought through for the spiritual development part of our plan. You can use a similar approach but alter them to fit your own plan, life situations, and the individualities of your children. This is what we did. And, by God’s grace – and so far – with two adult children who love and serve Jesus – it is working.
Although, I would say these should be good suggestions for any parent.
Here are 10 suggestions for raising godly children:
1. Realize that raising godly children does not usually happen by accident.
It will require proper planning and implementation. You can’t just “hope” for the Bible to impact the life of your children. You’ll have to work at it daily.
2. Know what you want your child to look like as adults.
Ultimately, as I said before, we wanted our boys to be like Christ, so He became the primary model we used. We talked about Jesus often. He was no stranger in our home – not just a Sunday occurrence.
3. Define for them what it means to be a Christ follower.
A working definition for me is one who knows what God requires of him and is willing to do whatever it takes to meet the requirement. We wanted our boys to understand it was not just a term it was a life mission.
4. Strive to live like Christ personally.
I realized early in parenting that our boys would each, in many ways, be copycats of both of us – but especially me. Because of this, we were conscious of the fact they must see us willing to live out our own definition of who a Christ follower – being willing to walk by faith, even when we didn’t understand all He was doing – which was often. We had numerous hard seasons of life when the boys were little. We wanted them to see us handling the stress of life by seeking Christ’s input into our situations.
5. Have basic principles of spiritual growth that you want each child to learn.
For me those were:
- How to hear from God.
- The importance of prayer.
- What it means to be a student of God’s Word.
- The act of surrendering to God’s will.
- To apply Scripture to daily life.
6. Find practical teachings from God’s Word.
Boys seem naturally attracted to stories about action, even violence to a certain extent. Of course, we wanted them to understand those things from a biblical perspective. And, the Bible is full of great stories. This meant looking at the characters of the Bible and how their lives represented Christ, how they heard from and obeyed God, and also how sometimes they failed to do so. Also, reading through Proverbs and Ecclesiastes was another helpful too to help implant wisdom in our boys. We talked about the stories of the Bible and how they impacted us today.
7. Individualize teaching time for the child.
We seldom did the typical Bible study setting. We weren’t the weekly family devotion family. It simply didn’t work for us. We looked for teachable moments with our boys – for one boy, with me that was often while pitching a baseball together and for the other it was while kicking a soccer ball. Bedtime was another opportune time for teaching. It is amazing what children will do to delay bedtime, but if the discussion is productive We always felt their character development was most important. Dinner time was another opportunity when we could talk about the things of God.
8. Be purposeful to talk about the specific character traits you want your child to have.
We decided each year what was most important for each boy to learn that year. We purposely brought up character topics, such as honesty or how to treat girls and discussed it with them during teaching moments when we had their full attention.
9. Be willing to grow in your own learning of who Christ is.
Over the years, our understanding of who Christ is and how He relates to us and the world around us has continually grown. We allowed our boys to walk through those changes with us. We weren’t afraid to let them know we didn’t have answers or that we were wrong.
10. Pray and trust Christ.
I know plenty of examples where parents did everything we did, yet they haven’t experienced the same results. Only God’s grace can really build godliness and every child has the ability to resist that grace. In the end, do all you know to do and trust God with your children.
I took personally that one of my responsibilities as a father was to see these implemented in our home. I am thankful for a supporting wife who has worked with me to balance my role with her more nurturing role (which she is excellent at completing). So far our now adult young men are following after God’s heart in their own way.
My role has changed from my boy’s primary teacher to one of a mentor or coach. I’m their friend – still their dad, but it’s different now. They call me regularly for advice. They want my input in their life. More than anything, however, I’m thankful for the godly young men they have become.
De-exceptn+ 