It’s hard for kids to be motivated when what is being asked of them doesn't feel like it matters, has no immediate relevance, or isn't interesting. If they feel overwhelmed, coerced into the task, or if their mood is low, chances are their motivation will be low too. If there are distractions or the environment isn’t conducive to getting the job done, it’s less likely they will start. And if they don’t have the skills or the belief they can do the job, then why even begin?

I want you to stop and think for a moment about the last time you were completely motivated to do something. Why was that activity motivating? What were the conditions and your frame of mind? In my October 5 blog, “Rewarding our kids can kill internal motivation,” I wrote about what doesn’t help foster motivation. The good news is that there are plenty of factors that can. Read on to learn more!

One of the most frequent concerns I hear from parents is that their kids aren't motivated. She doesn't do her schoolwork. He won’t study for his test. She won't help with household chores. They won’t practice their musical instrument. We want them to want to do all these things, and we start by feeling perplexed about why they won’t. Our confusion then leads to frustration and sometimes anger.

So what do we do? We question. Try to reason. Attempt to understand. Then we may move toward nagging, reminding, cajoling. We may offer incentives or rewards. Then consequences and punishments. Yet often, in the long term, none of these seem to work.

An important thing we need to realize is that no matter how hard we try, we can’t make our kids do something they don’t want to do. And our attempts at forcing them often make matters worse. Read more here

Parents have come to me perplexed by their child’s quickness to quit, their lack of desire to try something new, challenging, or slightly out of their comfort zone, or even giving up on something they used to love. Where does this apparent lack of confidence come from?

Years ago during the “self-esteem movement” parents were encouraged to praise their kids frequently in order to boost their self-esteem. We are now finding that too much generalized praise can backfire, as you can read about in my latest post titled “Mindset, Failure and the Inverse Power of Praise”. New research now tells us that praising effort rather than outcome or ability is what is going to help children grow and succeed. Yet Carol Dweck, the founder of the mindset idea has also come to realize that only praising effort can create a “false growth mindset”: a child can try their hardest and still not find improvement if their efforts are in the wrong places. In other words, if the strategies they are trying don’t work, no amount of effort will help them see improvement. It turns out that improvement and achievement that comes from a growth mindset is a combination of effort and hard work; finding new strategies when what you are doing isn’t working; seeking help and mentoring when needed; and seeing mistakes not as setbacks but as opportunities for growth.

Read on to learn more about how mindsets play a role in your child’s ability and perseverance in school, athletics, the arts or any activity they are passionate about.

Breaking curfew. Telling you they are spending the night at a friend’s house whose parents are home and you later find out they were at a party where alcohol was flowing freely. Not doing their assigned chores. Going out and binge drinking until blacking out. Sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. Vaping, smoking pot or doing other drugs. Staying up until 3AM in their rooms playing video games. Talking back. Being mean, rude or disrespectful. Disobeying family rules or agreements. Pure defiance. Teen rebellion can run from the relatively innocuous to the extreme…

Imagine the relationship you have with your child or teen as if the two of you are attached together by a rubber band. Using Vicki Hoefle’s rubber band analogy, you can see that there is no stretch in that rubber band when you are raising an infant. You keep your baby close and make all the decisions for them. Then, as your baby grows into a toddler, you allow that rubber band to stretch just a bit so your child can go out and explore, but you have your hand held tightly around that band…

One of the fundamental challenges about raising kids for me is allowing our children and teens to be themselves, while also providing guidance, support and skills to navigate the complicated and unpredictable world in which we live. It is a question that is coming up for me as I navigate raising teens who are soon about to leave the home. Perhaps it is my parental anxiety that comes creeping in …

Sometimes the world perceives parenting and raising children as binary: either/or, this way or that way, one or the other. It is not. While I believe it is our imperative as parents to allow our children and teens to be who they are, I also believe it is our job to teach them skills to live productive, contributing, happy, healthy lives. I don’t think these two are mutually exclusive…

Studies show that when we give a child a complicated toy without instructions rather than tell them how to use it, the child will find all sorts of possibilities in that toy rather than play with it in some predetermined way. If we provide our children and teens with a garden and allow growth to occur rather than a set of carpenter’s plans that tell them how to build, possibility blossoms.

In this week’s column I invite you to shift your focus from the worry about your kids to their potential. Which wolf will you feed? Feed them with creativity and possibility rather than fear, worry and anxiety. Rather than orchestrating every outcome, see her as an individual with the universe inside her. 

As Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sing: 

“We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,

​And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” 

Read more to discover the garden…

Read the pairs of statements below and consider how each sounds to you:

“Don’t speak to me like that!” or “Ouch. That hurts. You must be pretty upset to use words like that with me.”

“Stand still!” or “Your body is telling me you have a lot of energy right now.”

“Calm down. You’ll be fine.” or “You seem pretty stressed out about that test tomorrow.”

“Go to your room!” or “Something doesn’t feel right to you. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“You two stop fighting!” or “I hear two angry voices.”

“You’re grounded!” or “You had a hard time following our agreement tonight. We’re going to have to talk about that.”

We can demand that a child or teen behave a certain way, dismiss their feelings or experience, or shame them for their actions all in the name of helping them learn a different way of behaving. And sometimes these strategies can get the child or teen to do what we want in the moment. Yet what is this teaching, how is it teaching, and how does it contribute to how the child or teen is feeling?…

“My ten year old acts as if he can't get himself out of bed in the morning even though he can and has for years. He gives up after minutes of attempting his homework. And he shies away from trying anything new. ”

“When I ask my five year old to pick up her belongings, she whines, drops what she is carrying, can't seem to put her things away, and ends up crying as if this was the hardest job in the world.”

“My 15 year old refuses to look for a job. They lie around the house, are absorbed in their phone and act as if I’m the worst parent for asking them to help around the house.”

“As the parent, I’ve tried everything and I don’t know what to do!”

In my Nov 3, 2021 blog I write about kids who shrink away from or avoid life’s tasks. If you have a child or teen like this, they may be operating from the mistaken goal of “avoidance” or “assumed inadequacy”. How you know if your child is operating from this goal rather than one of the other three mistaken goals (attention, power or revenge) is that you, the parent, feel helpless or hopeless. As much as you’ve tried you have no idea how to help this child overcome their fears of attempting the task in front of them.

Children like this are convinced of their own inadequacy and inability to succeed to the extent that they work to convince those around them of this too. They shrink, give up, refuse, retreat or complain. Their protests and lack of motivation can be so frustrating to parents that we end up giving up and often do the task for them – we enable and we rescue. Our children’s lack of belief in themselves eventually trickles over to our lack of belief in them (and sometimes it’s hard to know which came first).

As Vicki Hoefle says, what this child really believes is “I don’t believe I can, so I will convince others not to expect anything of me; I can't do anything right so I won’t try, and my failures won’t be so obvious.”

What these kids need is a sense of courage. And they may need our help to develop it. Read on to learn more!

Are there times when you feel like your relationship with your child or teen is lacking – that your kindness, attempts to engage or requests for help are met with disrespect or anger? Some of this may be part of how your child is showing their developmental need to separate from you. And some of it might come from our kids feeling a lack of significance, and showing their hurt by wanting to hurt back.

Read on to understand what this “revenge-seeking” behavior is all about.

If the sass, disrespect and hurtful comments have become persistent, give your kids ways to feel that they matter.

Imagine a power struggle as a game of catch between you and your child where the ball is the thing you are fighting over. You throw the ball to your child asking them to do something, and they throw it back at you saying “No!” You then throw it back harder: “You will do it!” Your child whips the ball back even harder yelling, “I will not and you can’t make me!” And this goes on until the game becomes about who can throw the ball the hardest until the other gives in, angry, exhausted and defeated.

What if instead we just put the ball down and tried to solve the problem? Don’t engage in the power struggle. Take a deep breath. Walk away. Lock yourself in the bathroom if your child follows. Come back and discuss when everyone is in a place where they calm and clear-headed. As Kim Lee-Own says, come alongside your child and see if you can solve the problem together.

Read on for more ideas of what to do when you find yourself battling it out with your child or teen in the midst of a power struggle.

When we are engaged in a power dynamic with our children or teens, the relationship can become more about who is right and who is wrong. As parents we feel angry or challenged. No matter what we do it feels like there is always resistance. Can’t our kids ever do what they are asked?

Where do power struggles come from and what are our kids trying to achieve? Read on to unpack this very common parent-child dynamic and what you can do to help your child or teen feel more empowered rather than fight you to find their power.

You know you have an attention-seeking child if you have a child who always interrupts you when you are on the phone, picks on siblings when you are busy, wants to play when you are working or cooking, is always forgetting things, becomes mischievous or doesn’t follow through on agreements or constantly asks “why?” You find yourself repeatedly nagging, reminding or otherwise engaging. Attention-seeking children keep us busy with them by…

I’ve recently picked up child psychiatrist Rudolf Dreikurs’ book “Children: The Challenge”. It’s a classic and some of the examples are outdated yet the philosophy about what children need and what motivates their behavior is so right on. It is this philosophy, originally developed by psychologist Alfred Adler, that is the foundation for many parenting programs including Vicki Hoefle’s work and “Positive Discipline”.

The idea is that all human behavior has a purpose and that purpose is to attain some sort of goal. We are social beings, and as such our ultimate goal is to feel a sense of belonging and significance within our immediate group (the first of which is our family). As such a child’s behavior is a means to attain the basic goal of feeling they belong and finding their place in the family.

Through trial and error and by trying on different behaviors children decide which behavior works to get their needs met. As Dreikurs says, children will “repeat the behavior that gives them a sense of having a place in their family and abandon that which makes them feel left out”. If productive behaviors don’t give them this sense, they will try on “misbehaviors” to see if this new way of acting gives them a better sense of belonging.

Interested in understanding more about how this works? Read on!