March 10, 2021   |   Tagged Parenting,

Persuasive Parents - Helping Kids Adopt Healthy Lifestyles

A Message for Parents on Persuasion

You can demand that your children obey you, plead with them, bribe them, and punish them but that doesn't guarantee they will follow through with your vision once they leave home. Instead, parents should have the goal to persuade children to adopt quality life habits that come from mutual agreement rather than total subservience.

The reality is, you have eighteen years to equip your son or daughter to leave your home and become the person he or she was designed to be. One family disallows sweets in the home. Their children beg for candy at school. Their friends bring them sweets and desserts because the kids are obsessed with sugar. They do not agree with their parents. They obey at home, but their hearts are not in alignment.

Requiring obedience without the heart of a son or daughter creates a command-and-control environment. Instead, a home where the kids love, trust, and respect the parents, who understand and fully agree with the importance of healthy eating, will maintain this discipline throughout their lives. The same is true for all aspects of life: doing chores from an attitude of service rather than sullen subservience, loving to read or study, and becoming a life learner rather than only trying to get a higher grade, developing talent through self-motivation rather than making parents the self-starters.

Here are a few great tools:

• Help your son or daughter understand the “why” behind the rule.
• Clarify your expectations and follow through with expectations.
• Focus on the attitude more than the behavior. Compliance with a bad attitude is a mutiny in the making.
• Build your level of respect with your son or daughter so that they really desire to listen to you. Respect is built through removing hypocrisy, unfair behavior, and inconsistent or non-admirable ways of living.
• Walk through the consequences of unhealthy choices.
• Ask forgiveness for behavior that is severe, apathetic, or hypocritical.