My Child Never Listens To Me

"I nag and I nag and I nag. He just doesn't listen. For example, I tell him to turn off the TV, it's time to do his homework. No response. So I say it again. He still doesn't respond. Sometimes I repeat myself a half a dozen times. Finally, I stand in front of the TV and scream at him and he looks up and says `huh?' And you know what really gets me? Then he's annoyed because I interrupted his program and yelled at him."

Sound familiar? There are few things more annoying to parents than when a child doesn't listen. We begin by asking nicely. It's usually a reasonable request, and not necessarily one that would even take that much effort on the part of the child. But we get no response. As we repeat ourselves, we begin to feel more and more angry, out of control, insulted, and disrespected. Ultimately, we explode at our child and she is finally motivated enough to do what we've asked. One parent told me that she deliberately raises her voice, because that's the only thing that seems to "work" with her daughter. But does it have to be this way? Is it necessary for parents to lose their temper in order to get a child to listen? Is "yelling" an appropriate technique to hone a child's listening skills?

I believe that yelling actually works to the detriment of the child, and excuses her from listening, rather than teaching her how to listen.

In Robert Fulghum's book "All I Ever Really Needed to Know, I Learned In Kindergarten," he tells a story about a village in the South Pacific where "a unique form of logging" is practiced. He says that when a tree is too big to be cut down with an ax, one of the villagers who has special powers goes to the tree each morning and screams at it at the top of his lungs. After thirty days of screaming, the tree dies and falls over. The villagers claim that it works because screaming at living things kills their spirit.

This is definitely true with our children. Enough screaming at our children will slowly kill their spirit, their inner motivation. Without that inner motivation, they become less and less likely to cooperate.

"But," parents claim, "yelling works." There's a reason that it works. It works because your raised voice and harsh words serve as the child's cue to listen. Children tune out nagging because they know they don't have to listen yet. Then, when you raise your voice, your child tunes back in because he knows the nagging is over and it's time for business. In other words, parents who nag, then yell, have conditioned their children to respond only to the yelling. In order to teach your child to listen, you'll have to pick a different "cue" which will send the signal that you mean business. This "cue" will not only teach your child to listen, but also to take responsibility for turning off the TV, doing his homework, picking up