All right, everyone, I think I have the number one most popular question parents ask me all the time.

And here it is. Why don't my kids listen? Every day they have to put on their shoes before they go to school.

This is kind of obvious. And every day they don't listen. I have told my kids a million times we don't throw hard baseballs in the living room where there are lamps and TVs, and still, that seems to happen on the regular. Why don't my kids listen? Okay, deep breath. This is exactly

what I'm going to answer today, but I promise to do better than just telling you why our kids

won't listen because that would be a little annoying if that was the only thing I heard. I will go

further and I will tell you what you can do so your kids do listen more often.

I'm Dr. Becky and this is good inside. We'll be back right after this.

We'll be back right after this. All right, so we're back. We're talking about listening. And I just want to name that if you often have that thought in your head, why doesn't my kid listen? I just want to make sure that

you know that every other parent I know also has that question. I just want to break the illusion

that there is some family where like the kids listen all the time or the kids are perfectly,

quote, obedient in the mornings when they have to go to school. And I would actually go further and saying,

I don't know, maybe that happens. But we'll see over the course of this conversation that

listening is a much more dynamic, much more complicated topic than the word listening would

indicate. And if a child is actually perfectly obedient all the time, I'm not sure that ladders up to what we'd

want for our kids when they're older, because I just don't know anyone who said, oh, my 30-year-old,

they are just obedient to anything anyone says to them. They don't think for themselves and just

follow along. I've never heard someone brag about that. I mean, I've never heard someone

brag either about my third-year-old has never followed a rule in their life, but I think now we're at

the nuance. How do I get my kid to listen more often? How do I react in the moments when my kid

doesn't listen? Do I get the reason for that? Can I work through it with them? And the nuance,

the area between two extremes, is definitely the area I like to be in. And so that's what we're going to

aim for today. Here's a question I got from a parent. I can't get my kid to listen to anything I say.

...