You can gain cooperation, but not by nagging
The Bad News
If you’re a parent you know that you can’t make your child do anything. You can lay the baby down in her crib but you can’t make her go to sleep. You can probably force your child to take his hat to school but you can’t make him wear it while he’s there. You can teach your kids right from wrong how to live and what to do but — as you may have noticed — you can’t make them do as you say.
The Good News
There are things you can do to inspire your children to choose to do what you want them to do. For example a child may not want to clean her room but when faced with being grounded she chooses to do it. The task of cleaning is not as unpleasant as the prospect of being denied the opportunity to get together with her friends. Inspiration to cooperate then can occur when a child is forced to choose to cooperate or “pay the price.”
Inspiration to cooperate occurs in more pleasant ways as well. Children sometimes want to do what their parents ask them to do not because they want to do the required behavior per se but because they want to please the parent. Acting in ways that strengthen the parent-child bond (i.e. following the 80-20 rule or employing other approaches to achieve warm emotionally attuned parenting) is a good way to enhance the likelihood of cooperation even without unpleasant demands. The child may have no interest in cleaning her room but chooses to do so because she knows her parent will be pleased.
Inspiration to cooperate also comes from a joyful parental model. Adults who hate cleaning for example have trouble inspiring their children to clean. An adult who considers tidying up to be a pleasurable activity and who therefore performs it with ease and enthusiasm finds it easier to get her children to approach the task in a similar way.
