The other day at a gathering, I saw an Auntie-Gee have a go at a young lady who I can only presume was her niece or some kind of relative.
The auntie said, clearly in a state of exasperation: “Uggghhh… could you please just help out more.”
That seems like a reasonable request, right? “Help out more”.
But it’s not. It’s vague and un-do-able. In fact, if anything, it’s un-training them.
What does ‘help out’ actually mean in practical terms? What did she want her niece to do? I’m a pretty self-aware adult and I had no idea what the auntie was actually requesting.
When the kids don’t respond or change their behaviour, the parents sometimes repeat the request louder, with more emphasis on the words, “please” and “just”, as if that will help.
I know so many households where the kids help their parents out loads, and I know so many where the parents want the kids to help out, but they never do.
Maybe they’re just bad kids, right?
I doubt it.
It’s much more likely that in the house where the kids help out, they were trained to help out. And in the house where the kids never help out, they were trained to not help out.
How do you train a child to help out?
Well, to start with, don’t say: “Help out more!”
Instead, give a specific, direct, do-able instruction.
For example:
Hey, you want to be a superstar and make life much easier for you Mum… and maybe even earn eternal paradise by letting her put her feet up…? Tonight, after dinner, take all the plates to the kitchen, throw the remains in the bin, then wash the plates and put them away.
Now, the kid might do this, or they might not – it’ll work about 80% of the time, but it depends on how much ‘buy in’ you have and on a lot of other factors. But, if you just say “help out more”, in my estimation, there’s about a zero percent chance of them changing their behaviour.
In fact, that vague, pointless instruction might even be a way for the parent to feel morally superior to the child. (Because “I keep telling them, to please just help out a little bit, but they still don’t, those evil little gremlins…”).
Anyway, if you want your kids to be awesome Muslims, get your spouse, in-laws or friends to look after them next weekend and come to this event, where you’ll get the biggest, most profound insight into how to live Islam, in a way that makes your kids way more likely to listen to you:
