3. Give your kids space and place. You can’t control which choices that your child makes. They know it and you know it. Embrace that and realize that you can control which choices your child has. If your child is sick and needs medicine, they don't have a choice in the matter of whether or not they take the medicine. But, they do have a choice as to how they take it. The easy way or the hard way. We used to play the medicine game in our house when our daughter was little. The easy way was her taking it with a spoon and chasing it down with an MnM. The hard way was us prying open her surprisingly strong jaws and using the medicine dropper and then taking away a favorite video for the next day. The choice as to which way she took the medicine was fully hers and we had to let go of the desire for her to choose which method we preferred. It was with great pride and respect that my three year old smiled and said that she would prefer the hard way. We actually all giggled as she put up a pretty good fight just to see if she could trust us to respect her choice.

4. Let the consequences do the screaming. Ask yourself a question—how did you learn to be punctual? Most likely it came through experience, the negative consequences of being late and the positive results of organized living. So what is getting in the way of your son or daughter learning those same experiential lessons? My guess is that it is your own anxiety. Because of this, I have made the timer my new best friend. Instead of me nagging my son to do what he needs to do before we leave for school and then hovering over him while he ignores me, I use the timer. I decide on a reasonable amount of time for him to finish breakfast, brush his teeth, and head out the door and I calmly set a consequence that I can live with if he doesn’t beat the timer. Then comes the hard part. I drop my anxiety. I let the timer do its thing. I let my son choose to do his. I don’t count down like NASA; I don’t remind; I simply give him space. If he makes it, great. If he doesn’t, I don’t need to say a word, I just enforce the consequence. By taking myself and my own anxiety out of the equation, I can walk next to him in the whole process without dragging him kicking and screaming. I allow something larger than both of us to motivate.

Kids can smell your anxiety a mile away; they have an incredibly sensitive radar for that kind of thing. So, instead of allowing your anxiousness to drive the boat, give them a clear cut timeframe and a clear cut consequence and then back off – show them that you respect them and their ability to do this without you hovering and you do amazing things for your relationship along the way.