How to Get ANY Child to Follow Your Directions

So how do you get any child to follow your directions, commands, instructions? Doesn't matter if your child isn't speaking yet on the spectrum or just typically developing and they're really hard to get your hand around. Okay, so the first thing you want to do is to ask only one time. So why do you only. Why do you want to ask only one time is because if you say it multiple times, what's going to happen is that you're training your child to neglect you, to ignore you, to. To think that, oh, if mom or dad says it like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times, he or she doesn't need to respond to it until you get even angrier. Or you're basically training your child to only respond when you get to a certain level of anxiety, of volume of intensity, Right? So do it only one time and you'll say, oh, how do I say only one time? If they're not doing it well, then you have to follow up with action. You have to take them like for instance, this cat. I would say, go away, right? I'm going to put her over there. Just that I teach her so she's going to come back. That's besides the point because every time I give a command, I mean it, I say, go away, please. And I take her away. And this is what you should be doing with children. And I've done this many times. You might be thinking, oh, this is not cool to be hand on on children. The matter of fact is, a lot of children don't like to be intrusively touched to do something because it's against their will. But you need to think about how to get them to do the thing in a less intrusive manner. So there's loads of training out there to teach therapists how to do this in a respectful manner. I learned it the hard way, right. The best way is always to touch the elbow of children or push them from the back on the shoulders whenever you're too forceful or you're hugging or you're like doing this if even a cat doesn't like it. So you have to think about how do you do it in a very not intrusive manner. So for instance, if you tell your child to throw this in the rubbish bin, throw this tissue in the rubbish bin. Yeah. If they don't do it the first time you say it, you say, ha, didn't do it, Let me help you. And then you push them from the back, go to the rubbish bin and then teach them to let go. And then I'll go in the rubbish bin. So you need to follow up with the action. And then the third point is to give feedback. All right? Feedback is all ways about either praise, positive or negative, which is not reprimanding, not scolding, but just telling them that they didn't do it. Like I just said, you have to label that they ignored you. You need to tell them, hey, didn't do it yet. Then listen to what I said so that a child's, oh, they do know when I'm ignoring, right? So instead of raising a voice, you can just say in a very neutral tone saying that, hey, you didn't do it yet. Oh wow, I thought you heard me. Let's try again. And then you do it. You say it one more time and you get your child's hands, push them towards the right direction and do the actual thing. When it does happen and even if you helped your child to do it, you should praise, you should say good job doing xyz. Be very specific. Even if your child is non verbal or on the spectrum, when you give praises, it's gonna help consolidate and cross close the loop to the command. So I don't know if you've ever seen those scientific experiments someone saw. If you talk praise, if you talk positively, even the water molecules have a different shape, right? Whereas if you scold, you reprimand and you say bad things, the crystals look different. All right? How the water is formed, I'm not a scientist, I'm just telling you. Even cats, even animals, children, they obviously know this, right? So when you catch them doing the correct thing, you must praise. Even if you help them 100%. All right? And then you might ask me, the stuff I tell my child to do isn't so easy to take them by the hand and guide them to go through because it's quite complex. So that's why I'm telling you to do some micro commitments, something that is a no brainer, very easy to do, very low bar, right? So if I tell my child to close the door, I'm going to push them over and help them close it and say good job, Nice closing the door, good job. So these micro commitments, just maybe picking something up, putting something there, giving me something, giving me a high five. And it needs to be something that makes sense at that current context, all right? A lot of parents when they do these micro commitments is as if it's out of nowhere, there's no reason to do it. It's like asking a dog or a cat to do a trick. It's do A spin for no reason, Blow a kiss. But there's no one saying goodbye, right? There must be a reason behind it. If I tell the child to give me something, it's for a reason. Give me the remote control, please. And then they might give it. Thank you so much. Thanks for giving me. And I turn it on to turn on the tv, or I want them to give me my cup so that I can pour myself a coffee. There must be a reason behind it. Okay, the last thing I want to talk about is rewards. A lot of therapists, a lot of people are now frowning upon rewards. But the problem is the nature of human behavior is through incentives, right? So you see this in macroeconomic, microeconomic, behavioralism, psychology, all these to do with incentives. Once you have incentives aligned, you can get anyone to do practically anything. Whether that's good or bad, that's up to you. How do you use it for good or evil? That's entirely up to people who know this kind of logic. Capitalism is all about incentives. So anyways, reward is something that you cannot run away from. Okay? Some children thrive. All children thrive with rewards. Some care about social rewards, some don't. Some thrive on praises, some don't. Some thrive on snacks, some don't. Some thrive on. You get the point? So it really is up to you to find the reward that works for your child. And then what people don't tell you is that once you reward, you have to start fading it out. Meaning in the beginning, maybe if they do micro commitments, I'm going to give them a lot of rewards, right? Praises, a tickle, a high five, a head rub. I might throw them up and down. I might give them a little snack here and there. I might let them watch the TV with me, right? But I'm going to fade it out. How does this work? So in the beginning, you want to do like a ratio, like 1, 2, 3. If they do three things, then I'll reward. If they do five things, I'll do a reward. Slowly fade it out. And when you fade it out, the thing is, a lot of parents just forget about it. I don't reward them anymore. And then they go on a consultation with me and I'm like, I wonder why they don't do that thing for you anymore. They don't respond to you. They don't whatever. Why? I don't know. It's just that they suddenly start to not do it anymore. I'm like, what happened to the rewards? Like, oh, I thought we were off it already. It's as if they were addicts or something. But the thing is you need to give the rewards in a way that is random. Okay, so quick side story. Let's talk about jaywalking. So in Vancouver Richmond, where a lot of Chinese people like myself from Hong Kong live in Vancouver Richmond, what do we do? I'm not being racist or whatever because I'm that person. Hong Kong people love to jaywalk. We love to cross the road when there's no cars. So the route to deal with it is always to use punishment. Give them a ticket. And this only works if there's no cameras looking, no traffic police around. Right. But what actually worked was randomized rewards. So whenever someone did follow the rules, some dude came out of the corner and gave them a pizza coupon or whatever. That was basically like a coupon reward. So what happens is that because it's randomized, they don't know when it's going to happen. There's an upside to something. People will start thinking and they will change the behavior because they don't know when they're going to be rewarded on this thing. So that's why punishments don't work. Rewards always work a lot more, a lot better. So then what you gotta do is to reward very consistently. And then when you start to fade it out, make it randomized so that they don't know when it's gonna happen. And it's as if it's there. It's the human right to get rewarded or you just gotta do the right thing. So that's how you incentivize a person in a very ethical manner. Okay? It doesn't matter if your child is 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, teenager, adult, doesn't matter. Randomize those rewards. Okay, that's it for this video. If you want to learn more about how to get your child to do anything you want in a very ethical manner and in the way that you want to teach them something when their behavior is ready, then please go to wwagents of speech.com course. We have a whole bunch of courses over the Internet. It's all free now. It used to be paid. I'll teach you how to get a line. We have a behavioral workshop that outlines the exactly how we got parents to teach their children how to sit nicely, how to follow them, how to eat without the screen, all those kind of things. So it's all there for you. Go check it out and I'll see you in the next video Here.