This is why your kids are not listening to you!

Some time ago I asked moms who are subscribed to my email list and those I know in person and via social media what is their biggest mom-struggle at the moment. Since then I wanted to write this post, but I must admit I’m actually nervous about it. “My kids are not listening to me”, “child not listening” – only those two phrases together have over 133,100,000 search results in Google!!

Is every parent struggling with this?

This subject is essential for probably every mom and dad! And it’s hard to talk about it because it feels so personal. Well, I’m afraid I will disappoint you. It’s not that personal. I will even risk a statement that in most cases it’s not even about you.

A short disclosure first – I am not a super-duper expert in the matter. I do have three kids and I must proudly say they are well behaved, but hey, it’s not that they always do what I want them to do!

And another thing is that I never wanted JustRedefine to be a parenting blog. I don’t want to tell you how to raise your children, however, I do want to make a couple suggestion how to not get crazy in the process!  Sounds fair?

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Kids are not listening. The research.

Taking it back to my survey. I had my guesses about the results, but the percentage just hit me – 89% of the responses was some kind of variation of “kids are not listening”. I cannot tell if my research had proper statistical significance to round it up to every mom, but who cares – that’s tons of moms who think their kids do not listen to them!

And so my research began!

What will I not tell you?

I will not spend the time to preach the theory about how is it that moms spend most of the time with kids on organizing their life so kids are bored and only treat you as a chores’ general; moms are bad, daddies are the fun ones. Why? Because :

1. I don’t buy it,
2. It makes moms look really bad,
3. There is nothing bad about organizing kids’ time, teaching them how to do chores and
4. I’m pretty sure some wifeless guy invented this conspiracy (take it easy, it’s a joke, I’m not man-hunting).

Also, I will not go into the whole nature vs nurture basis of child behavior. Scientists debate this for years and their main conclusions are that both genes and environment have an impact on human behavior. It doesn’t sound surprising, right?

Children are not born exactly as a carte blanche. Some of their predispositions are in the DNA, but then the huge role of the family and surroundings build this future adult. It is fascinating and please feel free to read this article about it or any other in the subject and I’ll focus on the aspect that I think is often not mentioned when the kids are not listening is discussed.

What can I tell you?

As I just wrote – no one is born completely undefined. Babies have their own characters, in just a couple of days, you can notice their likes and dislikes. Evolution equips them also with love for power and attention. If you think about it for a second it’s obvious that humankind would not survive if it wasn’t hungry for power. Our needs for love, attention and control (whether it’s good or bad, moral or not) caused civilization growth.

How does this connect with your kid not listening? Easy. Your little dictator wants your unconditional love, 100% of your attention, but also all the power and control over their own life and a bit of yours since those overlaps. Before we learn about humility, morality, commonwealth and so on, we are all egoists. Deal with it.

So what can we do about it?

As you see kids are not listening is a very complicated subject, because it’s not about listening and it’s not really only about the kids. You may not want to see it but not so long ago you were a kid and your parents had the same struggles with you. So I decided to make a short series of posts discussing the issue. You can read the next part here. Also, don’t forget to download the great resource below – I collected the advice from 7 various bloggers on their practical tips about dealing with kids, who don’t listen.

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