As parents you have a secret weapon that you can use to get your kids to do just about anything. However, there are two problems with this secret weapon.
- Your kids don’t want you to know that it exists. They know that if you use it they will be powerless to resist
- You don’t want to use it. Full well knowing that it will work you resist using it.
Your secret weapon relies on a simple principle. Everyone is lazy. Or put another way everyone likes things that are easy.
The truth is, people are going to take the easy way when given the choice. This was the guiding principle used in designing Easy Tie sholeaces and the focus of a year long experiment in changing my own kids behavior.
To demonstrate this point let me provide a real world example I used with my daughter.
My daughter loves crackers. She will always pick crackers when given the choice but I wanted her to make better food choices. One option would be to restrict crackers “NO CRACKERS”.
Or
You get crackers after you eat an apple. Either way crackers take on a special highly coveted quality and she will want crackers more. Use the power of EASY to your favor. I washed and prepped a container of grapes, carrots, apples and strawberries and put them at eye level in the fridge.
Prepped and ready
Easy fridge access
I Didn’t restrict crackers, I just made them more work to get to. I put them on the top shelf inside a kitchen cabinet with a door. She would have to get a stool, climb onto it, and reach on her tip toes to reach the crackers.
She now only occasionally asks for crackers and now prefers the choices that are easy.
My kids are 6 & 9 and are just starting to get into reading. I wanted to encourage them to read more so I started going to the library each week and picking out 20 fun books that they could read on their own. I put them in a book case that was at their level. They did not read them. Not once. Even worse when I had to return them they were upset because they didn’t get a chance to read them. I thought I was doing everything right for kids, books at their level, nicely presented and organized. They didn’t read them because it wasn’t easy enough. I did a quick experiment one night after they want to bed and put them on a chair in the living room by the couch. When I came out in the morning they were both sitting and reading!
Summary
Make things you want to have happen easy. Learning to tie with floppy monotone laces is hard. Kids are successful with Easy Tie shoelaces because it is easy. Pick your battle and find ways to make it easier. Now to make it personal maybe you could use the lazy principle to change your own behavior.
