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I regularly hear people complain about their children not listening to them. First of all lets clarify what this means, because it never actually means my children aren’t listening to me, it actually means my children aren’t doing what I tell them to do immediately after I tell them to do it. So now that’s clear lets looks at why this happens.

1. You don’t listen to them

We are quick to notice it in our children but often blind to when we do it ourselves, often our kids have to ask for our attention a number of times before we actually give it to them – whether we are distracted by the tv/phone/ipad/computer, or whether we are just deep in thought, or busy doing chores. Our kids often feel we aren’t listening to them either. If we want our kids to behave respectfully then we need to model that behaviour back to them.
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The ‘H’ word – managing my emotional buttons when it comes to Miss 3

So at the moment the ‘H’ word (hate) is almost as prominent in my daughter’s vocabulary as “mum”, “look”, and “why?”, and anyone who has a three year old would know that that must be close to 2,863 times per day (well it feels like that anyway). This word has this magical way of just not pushing my buttons, but smashing them!

Part of this is because my mum never let us use this word when we were kids (all our buttons have some programming that was done in childhood) but also because she says it about everything, even things she actually loves, even things that completely contradict each other:
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