What To Do When You've Tried Everything With Your Kids.
Have you tried everything with your kids? Well try this.
Millions of parents have gone through the same struggles that you are right now. You've tried time-outs rewards, punishments and even bribery but nothing seems to be working. It's like your kids are deliberately trying to drive you crazy but I'm here to tell you there's hope.
In this video, I'm going to share with you some secrets that will help you finally get through your kids and start seeing some positive changes. So don't give up yet watch this video and find out what to do when everything else has failed.
When you feel like you've tried everything with your kids and still don't know how to get them to listen, I want you to try these ideas.
1. Work with your child to create a list of their favorite things to do. I think of this as meeting your child where your child is. Let me illustrate this with the story. I have a friend and we're going to call him Brian recently he talked with me about how he feels so distant from his son Andy. Andy spends most of his time playing video games but Brian is a brilliant driven Type A Surgeon. He worked his way through college and medical school and this guy deserves every accolade he's ever received. He came from very little and now he is the go-to surgeon Brian has tried many things to get closer to Andy.
He's a very involved dad but he still feels a distance in their relationship every evening he's there. He's involved helping Andy with his homework how often this often just leads to a lot of conflict because Andy is careless and doesn't really care about school. He also recently took Andy camping boy was that a frustrating experience Brian loves to camp. He used to do that with his family growing up. He thought this would be a nice way to connect with Andy. It was not a nice way Brian came away with the experience very frustrated because for the most part, all Andy did was complain about how cold it was and they didn't even talk much.
I could see that Brian was trying to connect with Andy in ways that were important to Brian like school or spending time outdoors. I suggested that he find an activity that Andy was interested in. It was unlikely that Brian would play video games which Andy loved but he did mention the Andy love comic books. So I just suggested that he find a way to connect with Andy through comics well there just so happened to be a comic convention comic con coming up and I suggest that they attend this together.
I also recommend that he just sit down with Andy and ask questions about the comics, what he liked, what his favorites were, you know why this was his favorite, just any other question he'd come up with just to get Andy talking about his interests asking and listening were really meant to be ways that he could connect with Andy and it turned out that the comic con was so much fun for them both. So something simple like this made a huge difference in their relationship at least according to Brian he told me that they had spent more time that week just being with each other and he finally saw some excitement from his son like a genuine enjoyment of just being with his dad.
I had the same experience recently with my son Brian, I love to play golf and I decided this would be a really cool way for Brian and I to spend some time together. It was really one of the main ways that I connected with my own dad growing up even my grandfather when I was young that's all I ever want to do is play golf with them. I soon realized with Brian that golf was not going to be our form of connection. He was not interested he did not like it so I had to start looking at other ways to connect with him and Brian loved his dirt bike so I started doing that with him. I bought a dirt bike and I started going out with him.
This started a couple years ago it's now been a thing that we do together and I can't tell you how many really neat experiences we've had up in the mountains just sitting there after a ride. To be honest I'd still rather be golfing but I have found this really special way to connect with him and it's been very meaningful for our relationship.
My point in sharing these stories is that when you feel like you've tried everything and you still feel disconnected from your child get creative meet them where they are engage in their interests you'll be surprised how this changes things for your relationship.
Hey! Before I share with you another real life example I'd love for you to subscribe and hit the like button I'm putting more videos like this out on my channel every week and I'll send you more videos.
Let me share with you another story about how to meet someone where they are when I was a new therapist. My first job was in an outpatient clinic that was part of a hospital. It was a really great? first job it allowed me to see a lot of kids and gave me a lot of experience. My interest has always been working with young people but I'm telling you therapy with kids is a lot more challenging than it is with motivated adults who really want to be there in the first place because very often I'd have a teenager come into my office and the teenager was unwilling or maybe a partially willing captive and many times these parents were forcing these kids to come see me hoping that I would somehow help them but you usually can't just sit down with a kid and start doing talk therapy with them. They don't know me and and it's just awkward answering my questions.
No kid really wants to sit there for an hour being forced to talk and so I learned early on that I had to find creative ways of developing a relationship of connection of meeting that kid where that kid is and then we could have a meaningful experience. One day I saw this new client a mother who who wanted me to see her son and she was there for the first session just her she was going to give me the backstory so we'll call her son bobby and she told me that bobby was going to come see me whether he liked it or not and I was not his first therapist.
In fact she told me that he had already been to over a dozen psychiatrists and therapists none of whom he would even speak to he wouldn't even utter a single word and she felt like they had tried everything imaginable and we're now only seeing me out of pure desperation. So I'm up for a treat now, next week I'm going to see this boy and the bar for success is actually pretty low because all I have to do is get him to speak or to even grunt and then I've made some progress.
What I didn't know ahead of time was that bobby had a medical condition that required him to be in a wheelchair full-time so I met bobby for the first time as his mother wheeled him into my office. His head was down looking at the floor and she pushed him right up to my chair and said good luck and then turned around and walked out and there's that body head slumped staring straight at the floor living up to the promise that I was not gonna be the first person he spoke to and over the next two sessions I tried everything I could think of. My questions went unanswered my magic tricks were ignored my riddles went unsolved. I tried to play cards pool there's a duck pond out there. We tried everything with him and it didn't take long before I realized that there was nothing I was going to be able to do to get him to talk to me.
Well, before our third session began I had already planned on telling his mom that you know she could add me to her list of therapy disappointments. I had done everything I could and at this point she was just wasting her time and her money to bring him to see me and I'm sure bobby would have agreed with that wholeheartedly. This is where it gets interesting and I think it's because I had already given up. I'd already accepted the fact there's no chance I was going to connect with this kid. I just sort of decided to meet him where he was that day in a very literal sense, meaning I was going to physically meet him where he was and I didn't even really think about this at the time. I spontaneously did it, so when bobby came in for his next appointment rolls in head down the floor, I just laid down on the floor underneath his head and I looked up into his face and so here's bobby sitting in front of me head facing the floor and there I am laying on the floor directly underneath his head and little did I know that this created a dilemma for bobby because now he had to look at me he couldn't look away so here we are me laying on the ground looking at his face and this is when he uttered his first words with a smirk on his face. What the hell are you doing? Bobby could not believe that I was laying on the ground looking up at him.
This was not how professionals acted, my response to what I was doing was that I was bored and I found it a lot more comfortable laying down than staring at the top of his head and that was the first smile or smirk of our next 10 sessions and we did it in this format he would roll into my office I'd lie down on the floor under his face and we'd talk for an hour. I actually looked forward to this because it was the most comfortable therapy session of my day but I also looked forward to it because I actually found a way to get this boy to engage with me.