forcibly withdrawn. These unhappy youngsters are forever crying, “Life’s
not fair! You’re always treating me like a child.”
Waging a Winnable War with Choices
There are some areas of our children’s lives that remain beyond our
control and are best avoided. If we exert our will over children in these
areas, we are destined to fail. Any parent who has pleaded, cajoled,
bribed, threatened, contorted his face grotesquely, or done headstands
trying to make a little tyke talk for relatives already knows about these
sorts of control battles. Vince isn’t going to talk unless he wants to. The
same goes for the battle of the pureed vegetables. We can force-feed
them down Lily’s little gullet all we want, but if she doesn’t want to eat
them, back out they come. And we lose. Ditto at the other end of the
gastrointestinal tract. We may demand that our children do their dirty
work on the potty chair, but before we know it, they’re over in the corner
of the family room with faces sporting an ominous flushed look.
These are battles we can’t win with commands. They pertain to what
children learn, think, and eat; when they go to bed or the bathroom; and
so forth. In each, children fight tenaciously to win, and when we get
involved in these battles, we invariably lose. We influence our children in
these areas only by modeling. We model how much we like our food at
the table. We talk, in self-referenced comments, about how good it makes
us feel to clean up our plate, to eat our vegetables. But every time we
issue demands, we invite a fight, and eventually we lose.
The secret to establishing control is to concentrate on fighting battles
that we know we can win. That means we must select the issues very
carefully. We must pick areas where we do have control over our kids.
Then we must offer choices in those areas.
We may not be able to make Emma eat when she’s at the table —
that’s an unwinnable battle — but we can control whether she’s at the
table or not. We may not be able to control when Justin does his chores,
but we can make sure he does them before he eats his next meal. We may