How to get your children to cooperate

A significant challenge for all parents for sure is to achieve the cooperation of their children. Do we make the greatest effort and we do not get the same result?

We aspire to small contributions from our children such as: tidying up their room, or getting them ready for school on time in the morning; having their homework up to date and also collaborating in household chores, in short, a real family work.

In many of the ways of projecting ourselves, we impose a pattern of parenting on our children that they do not assimilate completely and we do not obtain good results. We are under the resource of implanting obedience, but we forget something important for them. These imposing behaviors end up sowing in young people the idea that they are not serious enough to assume their personal self-control. We need them to know how much they benefit positively from family collaboration.

Authoritarian approach.

We often present a pattern of orders for our children to follow with a certain authoritarian approach. It is understood that by age they owe us respect and obedience and we ignore their will and impose our own. Actually this imposition is involuntary because of the false idea of losing power over our children, and the results are unfavorable. Young people need to be respected and we challenge them when we focus on the wrong power relationship.

Eliminate power struggles.

Even though our children know we are an authority figure, we must eliminate power struggles in our exchange dynamics. Children see the need to do their own will, to own their own decisions and not feel ordered by their parents.

What can we do to eliminate imposing behavior? The first way they can show better cooperation is by respecting their moral integrity. As we can imagine, power struggles within the home provoke feelings of rebelliousness and resentment in young people. We cannot show them, as parents, a rigid vision of what to do and simply obey; instead, we can create in them a decision to include our choice in their cooperative affairs.

Invite cooperation.

Inviting our children to cooperate requires a positive and favorable attitude for them because instead of imposing, we give them options with what we want them to do, so they perceive and declare the role they want to assume.

Let's tidy up the house, would you rather start in your room or help me in the kitchen? Would you rather do your homework in the afternoon or in the evening?

When we give choices to our young people, they see the possibility of being autonomous with their obligations and estimate from a decision of their own. The other part we can get is their commitment in choosing what, how and when they perform their actions as they see fit.

Sense of freedom.

In order to awaken in our children the feeling of freedom we give them the possibility to feel in charge of the situation, by determining for themselves the conditions of our task. They can spend time determining how they want to solve the homework instead of arguing about not wanting to do it.

The important thing about the feeling of freedom is that young people see the need to be guided by the best option, when it is we who set the rules on a general level and they on a particular level. If we do not make a possible sense of freedom real to them, they will hardly be motivated to cooperate voluntarily when we ne