More often than not, we have a difficult time getting our five-year-old to do much in the way of chores. At least not without a battle or at least some form of confrontation. Sometimes I hesitate to even ask her to take care of her responsibilities because I feel exhausted just thinking about how difficult it will likely be.
It is tiring to try and make picking up her toys in her bedroom and the living room sound exciting every single day. I don’t enjoy the ongoing power battles I’m still learning how to avoid. It also eats up a lot of time we could potentially be spending together in other ways.
On the other hand, sometimes my daughter volunteers her help. To which, I almost always oblige because not only do I want her to feel included, but I don’t want to push her away now, when her “help” may not be all that helpful as it could result in her never volunteering to help in the future.
Yesterday, I asked my daughter to pick up her blocks in the living room. A task that would likely have taken less than five minutes. She pushed back. She always does. But instead of demanding, pleading, or trying to turn it into a game, tactics that have been tried in the past, but never seem to work for long, I went on with my business, which at the moment was folding a freshly washed load of laundry.
A few minutes later, my five-year-old came in to find me.
“I’ll put all the socks in the bin.” She said. We keep the socks in a bin to be done last, once I can assure that there are no more loads that may or may not be containing socks. (Those things tend to get mixed in quite easily with everything else, the little buggers).
Laundry folding doesn’t take much time, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have her help me with something she wants to do, and then we can inevitably struggle over the forsaken chore later on. So she helped me fold the laundry and then emptied my lint catcher as I went to put away my own laundry, my husband’s, both of my daughters’ and then gave my son his own laundry to take care of and put away.
And when I came back, to my surprise, I found her putting away her blocks.
Then it occurred to me, something that we had learned about in my behavioral psychology classes, but had long been forgotten about since then.
If your child is telling you “no” so often, sometimes what will work is simply getting them to say “yes” to anything. It’s kind of the same idea behind changing your pattern of thinking. If you can convince them to say yes to one small thing, you may be able to build up to larger things in a snowball effect, eventually being able to get them to agree to the thing they didn’t want to do.
Put another way, if you can gain someone’s cooperation once, then it is more likely they will be more consistently cooperative in the future.
By cooperating with me in the laundry room, my daughter had effectively conditioned herself to be more agreeable, at least for the time being, in cleaning up the mess in the living room as I had asked.
Then I did something foolish. I acknowledged her. Bringing attention to the fact that she was doing what I had asked of her had, for some reason, convinced her that she no longer wanted to do it. This is what some people refer to as Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), but I honestly believe that isn’t really a thing.
I think it’s something more like Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), which can be diagnosed in other parts of the world but is not acknowledged as a diagnosis here in America. At least not yet. And I plan on discussing PDA further when I, myself, have a better understanding of exactly what it entails.
For now, my takeaway is to just let my daughter be and to praise her in those small in-between moments, or find some other way of showing her that I am proud of her. Because true, she may be a difficult child at times, but I know she is trying her best, and it wasn’t so very long ago that the difficult child in the family was me.
