How To Talk So Your Family Will Listen to You

When you’re hoping your child or your partner or co-parent will do something to help you get your in-the-moment or long-term needs met, it can be tempting to lean on quick fixes like rewards and consequences. Using these strategies can indeed coerce others into compliance—at least temporarily.

But for any of these strategies to work repeatedly, upping the ante is required. The rewards have to get more rewarding and the punishments have to get more punishing. That generally involves creating more desire for a reward, or sprinkling on more fear, shame, blame, guilt, criticism, or obligation.

Eventually, your child or partner might simply decide they’re no longer satisfied with the rewards or even care about the consequences. You can use time-outs, removal of privileges, or even “force” them to do an unpleasant task. You can give them the cold shoulder as a consequence for not doing what you’ve asked.

And yet, eventually, they’ll be old enough—and/or potentially angry and resentful enough—to access the things they want without you being able to stop them. They may be so worn down emotionally that they even give up trying to stay in your good graces. 

5 Steps to Being a Cycle Breaking Parent

Ultimately, using your physical, practical, or emotional power to coerce others into doing what you want them to do creates disconnection in a relationship. Do you want your child or your partner to comply with you out of fear, or because they have genuine consideration for your needs?

In this episode, I'm going to break down the elements of Nonviolent Communication that you can use to more effectively communicate with your family.

Having consideration for own your feelings and needs is job #1

If you want others to listen to your feelings and be considerate of your needs, you’ll need to be able to identify and take responsibility for your feelings and needs yourself—and communicate them. This requires you to have an awareness of your feelings and needs in the first place.

You can start by practicing detecting when your needs are being met or when they’re going unmet.

When your needs are being generally met, you’ll feel positive, accepting of, or neutral about what is happening in your environment and what you or someone else is doing or saying. When you notice emotions arising in you like resentment, annoyance, frustration, uneasiness, or anxiety, your needs aren’t being met. Something is interfering with your enjoyment of life or your ability to satisfy your own needs. You might notice that you dislike a situation or what you or someone else is doing and you want something to change.

Notice any body sensations and emotions that are rising up in...

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