ONCE IS INFORMING AND TWICE IS NAGGING??
    By Rich Warren

Once is informing, twice is nagging, three times is for anyone post-pre-school and up through the teenage years and four times is for the parents. Five or more times and either you're talking to a pre-schooler (and maybe as high as first or second grade) or wasting your time, emotional energy and patience. It took me twenty years to learn, understand and apply this method in all of its manifestations, so I'm doing you a big favor by telling you about this now. Read and learn The first time you tell your kids something, you are informing them because, hopefully, it is a piece of knowledge, a life lesson, or a task they have heretofore never heard of. Therefore, when imparting these "words of wisdom" you must speak slowly, using easy to understand words and phrases and, if you're lucky, they'll get it the first time. To keep this in perspective, however, the kind of luck I'm talking about here is on a par with winning the Super-Ball lottery that involves five states and has a grand prize of $300 million and up. Yeah, you got it. You'd have an easier chance landing your butt on Mars. But that's okay. That's part of what being a parent is all about. Patience. Lots and lots of patience (and if this were the 50's we'd probably mix in a "healthy" dose of either Valium or Scotch).

I'm going to skip the second maxim for a moment and jump to the third, that being the necessity of repeating yourself three times. The reason the magic number here is three is this: The first time you tell your kids something you are informing them, as I've already said. The second time you tell them the same thing you and they both know you are nagging them. The problem is that like Mr. Rogers and the makers of Sesame Street used to say, "Children have an incredibly short attention span". That's why for their shows to be successful they "fed" things to kids in short, fast bites, repeating them a specific number of times before moving on to the next topic. Getting back to you, though, when you hit the second time you are nagging. But you have to nag because they have already forgotten the first time. The problem for you is that you usually do this first repeat fairly close to the first time you spoke to them and so once you start your spiel they, if they are smart enough (and that includes all of our children because we all know we have the smartest kids in the world), they will recognize within a few words that you are telling them something they've already heardergo, they feel now that you are nagging them.

The problem that arises, however, is that even though you've informed them, and reminded them, they still haven't heard it enough to actually remember it on their own. That's why you need to repeat it one more time. Of course, it would be wonderful for all concerned if you could leave it at that but we all know as parents that's just not possible yet. At least not with this age group that addressing at the moment. So here we/you go with yet another repetition of those incredible words of wisdom. Except now we have gone beyond nagging to being frustrating/annoying to our kids and they will go out of their way to "forget/ignore" what we have been telling them because we've taken the joy out of learning and/or doing something that we wanted them to learn and/or do. We are quick to find this out because the trash is still under the kitchen sink, their rooms are still a mess, they're still making the same mistake on their math homework and the dog has gone to the bathroom in the living room (on the paper, but still in the house).