In my experience, toddlers are pretty helpful little people. They often want to do their bit – add a ‘tidy up’ song to the mix and you’re guaranteed success when it comes to packing things away.
But if you find yourself asking your little one to do something, and there’s zero effort to help on their part, you might need to be more assertive in your commands.
That’s according to new research from Durham University, which found infants were more likely to help their parents if they were given direct and insistent instructions – for example, “put the pen in the box now”.
Parents who used long-winded commands – where the message seemed to get lost in amongst encouragement, explanations, choice-based language and pleading tones – were less likely to be helped.
How did the study discover this?
The study, published in Developmental Psychology, followed 273 young children and their mothers in the UK, rural Uganda, and urban Uganda.
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