How to Talk to Little Kids So That They’ll Listen

Getting out the door in the morning can be like running a marathon when you’re a parent. It’s not just sorting through the mental checklist that’s a lot; it’s getting your child to actually cooperate in the process. The scene is a familiar one: Asking your child to brush their teeth, dress themselves, use the bathroom, and put on their shoes — and being met with resistance every step of the way. While the behavior is developmentally appropriate in young children, there are things we can do to mitigate it.  

How do we get kids to listen? It starts with the way we talk to them. “It helps sometimes to remind ourselves to step back from our managerial roles and reconnect with our kids as human beings,” Joanna Faber, co-author of the book How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen, A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages Two to Seven with Julie King, says on Munchkin’s StrollerCoaster podcast, during the “Listen to Me” episode. “Because how would you react if every time you saw me coming, you knew I was going to try to make you do something you didn't want to do? You'd flee at the sound of my voice. Kids have the same angry and defiant feelings that we get when people accuse us or threaten us or order us around. The first thing we want to do is try some skills that will make a kid feel cooperative because then we're not in a battle from the get go.” 

Achieving that begins with slowing down and spending more time talking with your kid. But what exactly does that look like? Faber and King break down the process ahead.  

A little time investment upfront helps save time in the end. 

“It turns out sometimes the longer way is actually the shorter way,” Faber says. “The more we listen to our kids and connect with them, the more cooperative they will be. We want to jump right to it and say, ‘Get your coat on now. Hurry up.’ But by sending out orders, we encounter resistance. Nobody likes to be ordered around, and nobody likes to be pushed around. So, if we can find some other ways to communicate, it makes everything easier and everything smoother. We think we don't have the time, but a little investment upfront helps us save time in the end and, more importantly, feel better about each other. It makes for a better atmosphere.” 

When kids feel heard and respected, they listen more.  

“The first big idea I like to talk to parents about is that there's a connection between how kids feel and how they behave. In fact, we can make that statement more generally,” King says. “There's a connection between how people feel and how people behave. So if you think about those moments in your own parenting career when you're glad that you weren't on reality TV — maybe you raised your voice or said something cutting — think about when those times tend to be. They tend to be times when we ourselves are not feeling our best.” 

How we feel as parents can determine how our kids behave. 

“Maybe we had an argument with our spouse or had a hard time at work, or we're just sick and tired of having kids hanging on us and whining all day long,” King says. “So there's a connection between how we parents feel and how we behave. And it's true for kids too. There's a connection between how they feel and how they behave. So if we want to make it more likely that they'll behave right, we need to pay attention to how they feel and help them feel right. So that brings us to the next question, which is, okay, so how do we help them feel good?” 

Acknowledging our children’s feelings is paramount.   

“Acknowledge their feelings sounds very simple, but it can be kind of complicated or hard to do in the moment,” King explains. “It's not even necessarily about making sure kids feel good, it's that we give them permission to feel what they feel.” 

Listen and respond the same way you would listen and respond to your peers.  

“Usually we don’t have problems acknowledging positive feelings,” Faber says. “It's the negative feelings that we want to brush away, that we want to be dismissive of. Sometimes it helps people to think about how you would talk to an adult. If an adult friend is upset about something, we usually know not to be dismissive. We don't just say to them, ‘Look, life isn't fair. There's no use whining about it.’ We don't jump right in with advice. We don't tell them like, ‘Oh, you lost your job, it'll be okay. There'll be another one, right?’ It's when we go in the opposite direction and we say, ‘Just let it go’ that they tend to cling more tightly because it's frustrating not to have someone understand your reality.” 

Acknowledging feelings — whether it’s sadness, anger, or frustration — isn’t the same as amplifying them; there’s a calming effect to it that’s rooted in science.  

“We're afraid that it's gonna make the feeling grow bigger,” King says, responding to some parents’ anxieties about acknowledging negative feelings. “There was just a study that was done recently that looked at brain function and discovered that if we put into words how a child is feeling or how a person is feeling, it actually calms down the amygdala.” 

Offer choices instead of commands. 

“One of the simplest things you can do when you feel a command about to rise to your lips is to convert that command into a choice because nobody likes being told what to do,” Faber says. “You know, ‘Do you want to get your pajamas on the regular way or do you want to try to do it with your eyes closed?’ Or, ‘Do you want to put them on the regular way or do you want to put them on inside out?’ Now your kid is thinking, ‘How do I want to do it? Oh, I want to do it inside out.’ It changes the whole dynamic.” 

Give your child more agency in the things they’re being asked to do.  

“Everyone has a drive for autonomy and parents often say to us, ‘Oh, my kid just wants to be in control,’” Faber says. “We say, okay, let's give them some control then. If a kid melts down about having to leave at a certain time, you can give that kid a timer to hold and put that kid in charge of the time and say, ‘Honey, will you tell us when the timer rings when five minutes is up and it's time to get our coats on?’ Then you'll find your kid coming after you like, ‘Mom, it's time.’” 

Descriptive praise is the best praise.  

“Some types of praise are more effective than others,” King explains. “We like to praise effort and not achievement. We make a distinction between what we call a value to praise and descriptive praise. A value to praise sounds like a ‘good job’ or ‘great work.’ ‘You're so smart.’ 

‘That was excellent, beautiful, perfect, the best.’ But when we give people global or a value of praise, it can cause them to doubt you. It can cause them to wonder if we're trying to manipulate them, or it can cause them to focus on their flaws.” 

Embrace a growth mindset.  

“There is a person named Carol Dweck, who's a researcher at Stanford,” Faber says. “She really went deep in investigating this phenomenon. She wrote a book called Mindset, and one of the most relevant studies that she cites was where they gave two different groups of kids a math sheet to complete. The kids in the first group, when they finished the math sheet, were told, ‘You are so talented at math. You are very, very bright.’ To the kids in the second group, they said, ‘Boy, these were tricky questions, and you stuck with them. You put a lot of effort into this, and you figured out the answers.’ Then they came to the first group and second group, and they said, ‘Would you like to try another math sheet, even more difficult?’ The first group who were told that they totally crushed it didn’t want to risk getting a lower grade in the researcher's estimation. But the second group is like, ‘Yeah, they think I work hard, I can work even harder.’ Evaluative praise can do the opposite of what we intend, which is it can completely shut kids down and make them stop trying.”  

It doesn’t always have to be perfect; what matters is the effort.  

“You can't always do it,” Faber concludes. “No one could do this stuff all the time. Don't beat yourself up. We give our kids 1,000 chances and then one more. Give yourself 1,000 chances and then two more. We aim for 70%. Some days, 50% is all we can manage. Sometimes even 10% can make a real difference in a relationship.”