How to Pick Your Battles With Kids

As a parent it's your responsibility to teach your children right from wrong and to keep them safe. Enforcing rules and setting limits isn't always fun, especially when your kids put up a fight. But some battles aren't worth fighting in the first place. Parenting is a lot easier when you know how to pick your battles with your kids.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Avoid battles by setting reasonable limits. Rules should be put into place to keep kids safe and responsible, not as a way to assert your authority. While it may be reasonable to ask a four-year-old to hold your hand in the parking lot, it's not reasonable to expect his twelve-year-old sister to adhere to the same rule.

2. Pick a consequence appropriate to the rule violation and communicate it clearly to your child. Battles with kids tend to erupt when they feel they are being treated unfairly. Sure, you should expect a child to say "excuse me" when she burps, but it's not appropriate to ask her to apologize to the entire room at large for interrupting the meal.

3. Ask yourself few questions about the situation. Consider: whether your child or another is at risk of getting hurt, whether your child is being disrespectful of other people or whether your child is showing a lack of responsibility that needs to be addressed.

4. Choose to ignore things that don't really matter. In the grand scheme of things, it's not that big a deal if your teenager dyes his hair purple or your preschooler goes to school in his pajamas. Neither of them are making morally unsound decisions and both are safe and healthy.

5. Decide whether it's more important to be right or to be flexible. Some situations don't always fit into a simple violation/consequence scenario. In those cases you will need to pick whether you want to reevaluate the situation or fight the battle to prove your point.

6. Examine the cost of winning. A battle from which your child will learn a valuable life lesson is often worth the anger and frustration. One from which you will both just walk away angry is usually not worth fighting.

Tips & Warnings

• As trite as it sounds, kids will be kids, and kids will ask for candy at the checkout line or get grass-stains on their pants at recess. Try to accept that there are some behaviors you will not be able to temper.

[AmandaMorin]

on 8/14/2008 For children of about 5, 6 and 7, consequences don't have to be anything large--it can be as simple as docking 15 minutes of TV, computer or whatever other entertainment he looks forward to, even taking away a few minutes of "mom time" can be enough. Of course in dangerous situations, immediate removal from the situation is the first consequence!

I'm a big believer in catching your child doing well, though I don't believe in rewarding expected behavior. You can set up a reward system broken into feedback for time periods. Depending on your child's needs, it can be anywhere from every 10 minutes to simply Morning, Afternoon and Evening. Check out this eHow:
http://www.ehow.com/how_2147420_use-behavior-charts-home.html

[esmendelsohn]

on 8/13/2008 Great article. I have 2 questions. What are appropriate consequences for children ages 5 (almost 6) and 7? How about rewards and how often should they be given? Intermittently is probaly best but at young ages it seems a tad cruel especially when training them to be responsible and polite. I like to catch my kids doing something right, as it balances the times that I catch them doing something wrong.

[only1special1]

on 2/27/2008 Great Article!

[BarryWaite]

on 12/14/2007 Excellent insight! Just curious what your personality type is? I do that for True Colors and am curious how much your personality influences your parenting. Great article.