How to Manipulate Your Kids into Doing What You WantExpand
In an ideal world, parents would always be patient and nurturing, and kids would always be cooperative and make smart choices. This is not an ideal world, so we parents need a few sneaky strategies to preserve our sanity when the days are much too long and our patience much too thin.
To be clear, we don't really recommend truly manipulative parenting or passive-aggressive strategies that scar kids forever. We're talking "manipulation" in the sense of shortcuts that can get us past all the "but I don't want to" and "but why?" complaints on the most trying days. More mindful and direct parenting approaches would be better, of course, but in case of emergency, you can try one of these tactics.