In this episode, I want to discuss the topics of commitment and compliance that I spoke with my children about in the last episode. A great example of this came up for us actually just the other day when one of my kids decided that in spite of the fact that we strive for good manners at the dinner table, he would try and eat his food using no hands.

This obviously was not something that we were very interested in entertaining. And the first thing I tried to do was reinforce to him that, Hey, these are the rules. We have good manners at the table. Now, one of the challenges with this, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later on, uh, this, this is a six-year-old boy.

Summary and Quotes

[00:00:39] – Reinforcing the rules

[00:02:36] – Commitment vs Compliance

[00:04:47] – Kids are different, they think different. They are experiencing things for the first time

[00:07:49] – It is ok to come to mom and dad with questions

[00:10:37] – Veiled curiosity from other parents

“Commitment from our perspective is when everyone understands the same objectives and they see value in achieving those objectives. From a compliance standpoint, compliance oftentimes is avoiding getting in trouble, which is not necessarily the same thing as doing the right thing.” [00:02:44]

“One of the biggest challenges that I have personally faced when I’m trying to explain the “why” to my kids is I know that I’m too verbose. I have a hard time making it simple enough to be effective, and it’s actually. It’s actually more challenging to communicate a concept with a child oftentimes than it is within an adult because I really have to change gears and I have to say, okay, more words are not better here..“ [00:06:28]

“We are going to copy by default, not by choice necessarily, but by default, we have been grown up under that same system by which they were successful in reproducing and raising us. So the easiest thing for us to do. Subconsciously is to just copy what they did, and it takes effort to make a change in that pattern of raising up a kid.” [00:14:49]

Transcript Below

To a child, minding manners is an abstract concept. So what I wanted to do was I was going from the compliance thing where saying, listen, you’re going to follow these rules. Instead, I wanted to get commitment from him. So what I decided to do was I decided to frame it from a different perspective once he said, well, why do I need to have manners?

I know he needs, he knows the answer to that question. Okay? But what we discussed very quickly was, first of all, we stopped the behavior so that he’s focused on me and. I asked him, I said, do you like going over to your friends and having dinner at their house or having a snack at their house?

And he said, well, of course I love that. And I asked him, do you think that your friend’s parents will continue to invite you over if you eat like this at their house? You said, well, no, of course they won’t. I said, do you think if I see you eating like this. That I can send you to their house knowing that they’re not going to invite you over again and that I’m probably going to hear about it, and that other people then of your friends will say, their parents will say, Hmm, do we want to have this kid over here?

Probably not because he eats like a dog very quickly. My son started to see the link between the abstract concept of manners and the concrete desire that he had to go and spend time with his friends and eat food at their house. So this is an example of commitment versus compliance. So just from a sort of a definitional standpoint, so we’re working from the same, vocabulary here.

So. Commitment from, from our perspective, is when everyone understands the same objectives and they see value in achieving those objectives.