When Your Kids Don’t Do What You Want

We had six guys at our latest Speak Up Cambridge Men’s Group, so it was a slightly quieter night with no new faces. As usual, we started by catching up on what had been happening over the previous couple of weeks, and this time there seemed to be a bit more lightness in the room.

A few of the guys were beginning to notice some of the things we’ve been talking about in recent weeks actually showing up in their lives. There seemed to be more awareness of when they were automatically reacting to something and when they were able to pause and respond differently. There was also more movement towards pleasure — doing things because they genuinely enjoy them rather than waiting until something becomes painful enough to force a change.

Those changes can be surprisingly difficult to notice in yourself. You don’t necessarily wake up one morning feeling completely different. Often it isn’t until the same old situation comes around again that you realise you didn’t react the way you once would have.

There was also plenty of humour before we got anywhere near the actual topic. One blue thumbnail for Blue September somehow led us into prostate checks, medical procedures and a suggested tattoo that is probably best left out of the official record. The guys who were there will know exactly what I mean.

It was actually nice to start there. Men’s Group doesn’t always need to begin with some massive problem that needs solving. Sometimes sitting around, talking shit and having a laugh is part of connection too.

Eventually we did get around to the topic:

What happens when your kids don’t do what you want them to do?

What are we actually teaching them?

Before the group I had shared a few posts about the topic on some local Facebook pages, and some of the responses were fairly predictable.

Take the device away. Turn off the internet. Punish them. Give them consequences.

I’m not suggesting children shouldn’t have boundaries, or that there should never be consequences for behaviour. But I think there is another question worth asking:

What are we actually teaching them when punishment becomes our main way of getting them to move?

If the message becomes, “If I don’t do what I’m told, something bad will happen,” then pain becomes the motivation. It can become do the dishes or lose the PlayStation, clean your room or lose the Wi-Fi, do what I want or something you enjoy gets taken away.

That might get the job done in the moment, but what has actually been learnt underneath it?

Perhaps we begin learning that we don’t need to move until pain arrives.

Then we grow up and stay in the job until we absolutely hate it. We ignore our body until it hurts badly enough. We remain in the relationship until something blows up. We wait until the money, stress or health situation becomes painful enough that we finally change something.

Pleasure becomes optional.

Pain becomes what gets us moving.

That was particularly interesting after some of our recent conversations because several of the guys were beginning to notice what happens when they allow themselves to move towards something because they genuinely enjoy it, rather than because life has finally become unbearable.

Is it respect, or is it dominance?

A few of the guys talked about restricting devices or internet access, and one of the words that came up was respect.

That led us into another question:

Is it really respect, or is it sometimes dominance?

There is a difference between somebody respecting you and somebody doing what you want because you control access to something they value.

If I have the power to switch off your internet, take your phone, control your money or make your life uncomfortable until you comply, I can probably make you do quite a few things. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you respect me.

It might simply mean I have more power than you.

And I don’t think that is leadership.

Leadership, to me, has much more to do with whether somebody would want to follow what you are demonstrating even if you weren’t forcing them to.

That turned the conversation towards something kids are particularly good at noticing.

They don’t just listen to what we say.

They watch what we do.

If I’m constantly telling the kids to do the dishes, but I work myself into the ground, come home exhausted, dump everything on the bench and decide the dishes are their job because I’m too knackered, what am I actually modelling?

I can talk about responsibility all I like. They’re still watching me.

Sometimes leadership might look less like standing in the kitchen demanding somebody else clean up and more like getting beside them and doing the bloody dishes too. Not because parents should do everything for their children, but because “Do what I say” and “Come with me” are very different forms of leadership.

What happens when something becomes scarce?

We also talked about restricting internet access and devices from another angle: scarcity.

Again, that doesn’t mean children should have unlimited access to technology. There may be very good reasons for boundaries around sleep, school, health, family time and screens.

But it can be interesting to notice how those boundaries are created.

If something desirable is repeatedly presented as scarce — you only have this much time, get as much as you can before I take it away again — sometimes the natural response is to cram as much of it in as possible while it is available.

We see versions of that as adults too. Eat it because it might be gone tomorrow. Spend the money because you might not have it later. Use every minute of the thing because someone might take it away.

The more useful question may not simply be, “Should I turn the internet off?”

It may be:

What am I actually trying to teach here?

Is it self-regulation, balance and responsibility?

Or am I mainly creating enough leverage to get compliance?

The action on the outside may look exactly the same, while what sits underneath it is completely different.

Attachment to the outcome, or connection to the child?

That brought us into another conversation around attachment and connection.

There can be a big difference between wanting something for our children and becoming attached to them doing it.

If I become attached to the outcome — you need to clean your room, get good marks, choose the right career, stop doing that, start doing this — their behaviour can start determining whether I feel okay.

And when they don’t do what I want, I react.

I might become angry, withdraw, punish, lecture, control or make my approval disappear until they come back into line.

Underneath that is a pretty important question:

If my child doesn’t do what I want them to do, do they still know they are loved?

That doesn’t mean approving of every choice. It doesn’t mean abandoning boundaries. It doesn’t mean becoming their mate instead of their parent.

It means the connection doesn’t have to disappear because they made a decision we don’t like.

Maybe connection sounds more like:

“I don’t agree with what you did, but we’re still okay.”

That is very different from a child slowly learning:

“I’m okay when I behave the way Dad wants me to.”

Want to change your kids? Start with yourself.

This became one of the bigger parts of the conversation for me.

I shared some of my own experience from the last four years. When Melissa and I first started doing our own work, I was trying to understand what was going on for me — why particular situations affected me, why certain relationship dynamics seemed to repeat, and why I reacted in some of the ways I did.

One of the biggest changes I noticed wasn’t actually in myself.

It was in our kids.

They seemed less argumentative, less judgemental and snappy, and more motivated to do the things they wanted to do rather than everything needing to be forced.

The strange thing was that internally I didn’t suddenly feel like a completely different person.

I still felt like me.

A lot of the time, I only realised something had changed when an old situation happened again and I noticed my response was different. Something that once would have fired me up didn’t have quite the same grip on me.

And when my reaction changed, the interaction around me changed too.

That has become one of the more useful ways I look at progress. Sometimes you can think, “I’ve been doing all this bloody work and nothing has changed.”

But perhaps you’re looking in the wrong place.

Look at your relationship. Look at your kids. Look at how your boss responds to you. Look at the people you keep meeting. Look at what happens when somebody says the thing that used to set you off.

The people around us can become a pretty good mirror.

Not because everything somebody else does is our fault, but because relationships give us somewhere to see our own patterns in action.

How do you speak to the part of you that is reacting?

That led us into some of the different tools I use, or that we use at The Healing Barn.

One was Ho’oponopono.

The version I sometimes use is very simple:

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

Rather than simply repeating the words, I sometimes imagine I’m speaking to a younger part of myself.

Think about the difference between the way we might speak to a frightened baby and the way we often speak to ourselves.

We probably wouldn’t look at a scared child and say, “Hurry up. Get over it. Stop being stupid. What the hell is wrong with you?”

Yet we can talk to ourselves like that all day.

For me, Ho’oponopono can be a way of turning towards the part of myself I’ve been judging or abandoning instead of attacking it for reacting in the first place.

We also talked about Emotion Code and some of the work Melissa does around exploring underlying emotional patterns. I showed the guys a simple form of muscle testing used within approaches like that, including how somebody can begin noticing a yes and no response for themselves.

Whether a particular technique resonates with somebody or not, the underlying question was the same:

What if there is more happening underneath the conscious story than the mind currently knows about?

What is anger actually trying to tell you?

One of the guys shared something that was happening in his relationship. His partner had been doing some counselling work, and sometimes anger would come up quite strongly.

We started talking about the dynamic between them and eventually ended up using a tennis analogy.

It was almost like she was standing on one side of the net trying to absolutely smash the ball back at him, while his natural response was to step off the court. He would retreat, avoid the argument and not return the ball.

Which obviously makes for a pretty shit tennis match.

There was some discussion among the guys about whether she was looking for him to engage more, push back or give her something to meet. I let the conversation go for a while because sometimes it is useful to see what emerges rather than immediately trying to provide an answer.

Eventually I came back to something we have been developing in my programme:

What if the anger itself has information in it?

The framework I shared was:

Anger — Urgency → Inadequacy → Resourcefulness.

The experience of anger can feel like urgency: I need to do something. I need to fix this. I need to solve this. Something has to happen.

Underneath that there may be a feeling that what I currently know, have or can do isn’t enough to deal with the situation.

That can become:

“I’m not enough to deal with this.”

And the wisdom in anger may then be resourcefulness. Instead of simply pushing harder, shouting louder or trying to force an outcome, perhaps I need more information, support, another perspective or another way forward.

Quite a few of the guys recognised something in that.

The question shifts from:

“How do I stop this anger?”

to:

“What might this anger be trying to show me?”

Not every problem lives in the mind

While we were talking about this, I noticed the guy whose relationship we were discussing was trying really hard to work the whole thing out mentally.

You could almost see the questions going around.

What does this mean? What should I do? How do I fix it? What’s the answer?

And sometimes there isn’t another thought that solves it.

Sometimes the thing we’re trying to understand mentally may still be held somewhere else.

That gave me a chance to demonstrate a little bit of ConTact CARE with him. I worked with the defensive holding I could notice, and afterwards he said he felt noticeably more relaxed.

There wasn’t some huge intellectual breakthrough.

He didn’t suddenly have the perfect answer to his relationship.

He simply seemed more settled.

That became another important part of the evening:

Not every problem needs another thought.

Sometimes the mind is desperately searching for an answer because thinking is what it knows how to do. But perhaps what needs attention is an emotion, a physical holding, a protective response or something underneath the words.

Maybe the kids aren’t the whole problem

By the end of the night, I don’t think the conversation was really about getting children to do the dishes.

The kids might simply be where the pattern becomes visible.

Your child doesn’t do what you want.

You feel disrespected.

The urgency comes in.

I need to make them do this.

Then perhaps comes punishment, control, withdrawal of approval or taking something away.

Suddenly we are no longer dealing with dirty dishes.

We’re dealing with our own relationship to control, respect, leadership, connection, inadequacy, pain and pleasure.

That doesn’t make someone a bad parent.

It just gives us somewhere else to become curious.

Maybe the most useful question isn’t:

“How do I make my child change?”

Maybe it is:

“What happens in me when they don’t?”

Because one of the most powerful ways we may be able to change the relationship with our children is to understand the person standing on our side of it.

Us.

Something to notice

The next time your child, partner, boss or somebody else does something that really gets under your skin, perhaps don’t rush straight to fixing them.

Notice what happens in you first.

Do you feel an urgency to make them behave differently? Does your sense of being respected depend on what they do next? Are you trying to lead them, or are you trying to control them? And if they don’t give you the outcome you want, can you remain connected to them anyway?

You don’t need to have the perfect answer.

Just notice what happens.

Sometimes seeing the pattern clearly is the beginning of changing it.

If you recognised yourself in this

Maybe while reading this you had one of those slightly uncomfortable “shit, I do that” moments.

Perhaps it’s your kids. Perhaps it’s your partner. Perhaps it’s somebody at work. The same argument happens, the same reaction comes up, and afterwards you wonder why it keeps getting under your skin so much.

You don’t need to understand the whole pattern before asking for help with it.

Bring what is happening now — the argument, the anger, the reaction, the feeling of being disrespected, or simply the sense that the same thing keeps happening.

We can start there.

A 60-minute one-to-one session with me is $150, and we can use that time to slow the situation down, notice what is happening underneath the surface and follow whatever is actually showing up.

Book a 60-minute session with Scott

Scott Holdem
The Healing Barn

Helping you understand what’s really going on underneath the surface, so you’re not just reacting to life automatically and can start choosing how you want to move forward.