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What do you do when your child doesn’t want to go one of these places:
What do you do? First, at a time well before the event – don’t let the pressure of time dominate the conversation – ask your child why they don’t want to go. You are not trying to solve the problem yet. You are simply curious.
So often you might find it is something simple and easy to fix!
“I don’t like practice because my shoes hurt.”
“Wow! That’s it? We can solve that problem right now. Let’s go get some shoes that work!”
So often we underestimate how our children think and feel about a situation and when we address their concerns or fears with compassion, we can help solve the problem forever instead of having to fight them about it all the time.
So what happens when they just miss Mommy or Daddy? Is it ok to give them an incentive like offering to do something with them when you pick them up? Absolutely. Not every time, but sometimes incentives are good to get our kids “over the hump” with a situation. Hey, it works for us as we try to create new habits. Why not our kids?
And then sometimes as you ask questions we find out maybe a teacher is being mean to them or they are getting bullied at school or they don’t really like baseball. Now we really get to be the parent and help them work through the issue. Maybe it’s a talk with the teacher or we decide we will finish the baseball season and then try another sport.
Each situation is different, but the cool thing is we have asked questions to get to the heart of the matter so we can work together to solve the problem. So much better than having to fight our way through every drop off!!
