My 5-year-old used to fight me EVERY NIGHT about brushing teeth.
“No! I don’t want to!”
“You have to!”
Meltdown. Tears. Exhausting.
Then I changed one thing:
Instead of “Go brush your teeth,” I said:
“Do you want to brush teeth before or after pajamas?”
He thought about it. “After.”
Done. No fight. Teeth got brushed.
This is an excellent parenting hack. I’ve been using it since Klara was first learning to walk, and it works great. Kids want to make their own decisions. They want to show initiative and be responsible for themselves. This is a great thing and must be encouraged.
Klara has been choosing what to wear since she was in onesies. Of course, she was choosing between the two onesies that I curated based on weather conditions. These days she dresses herself, and we have zero struggles over “don’t forget the scarf and the gloves” because she’s long been responsible for her own attire.
Give them a choice and respect it, even if it’s weird. Klara brushes her teeth after breakfast. I don’t get it because I brush mine immediately after getting up and love it. But I’ve accepted that everybody is different and instilling initiative is much more important than insisting that my way of doing things is optimal.
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Competition works very well for my kid. Can you brush your teeth? I bet I can brush mine before you do…
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I honestly haven’t figured out what works for my middle kid yet on this. We’ve been through resistance on teeth brushing with all of them. With eldest, sat down and explained *why* we brush teeth, what the consequences of not brushing teeth are, and provided a hand mirror, and non-mint toothpaste. That seems to work. Middle kid: still thinks he is gonna win some sort of trophy if he “gets away with” not brushing, and it’s going to be worth having every tooth rot out of his mouth, because he wins or something. Ugh. No amount of reason gets through. With youngest, it’s a simple rule: brush teeth, *then* bedtime stories.
Every kid is different.
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giving choices, and “competition” like mentioned above work well for my boys. Who will make it to the bathroom to brush their teeth first? Who can get their pajamas on fastest? This can backfire though, when the loser is upset they lost…luckily my youngest still thinks everybody is a winner so at the moment this strategy still works for us.
The other thing that works for me is creating “scarcity.” You don’t want to eat your vegetables? Well, mommy will eat them for you then, we don’t want to waste food. Then all of the sudden my youngest wants to eat everything on his plate. At least for a few bites. I never force it, if he really doesn’t want to eat something I leave him be, but this works 9 times out of 10. Usually he still tells me it’s yucky but he’s eating it 😂
My youngest also is obsessed with one specific shirt so I have two of them. He gives me a kiss and says “thank you mommy for washing my shirt” every time he sees he can wear it again. And we do it wear probably 3-4 days out of every week. I will probably cry when he outgrows it.
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