How about spending 20 minutes of your time, to learn a tip that will save you 20 minutes per day? Sounds interesting doesn’t it? That’s what the first of the 3 skills Robin Booth teaches in his Udemy course claims to do for you.
Do you find yourself saying, “No” or “Don’t” a lot? Have you ever said “Don’t throw things inside the house!”. Did you know there is a better way to address your child? Meet skill number 2.
Ever hear “I can’t do it, I can’t, I can’t….” and want to change that attitude? I know I do. That’s skill number 3.
Who exactly is Robin Booth? Is his “How to get your kids to cooperate – even if they don’t want to” Udemy course worth a watch? We recently took it for a spin and are here to let you know exactly what we thought and just what you’ll get for you money.
Table of Contents
Course Overview
Course Length: 30 bitesize 2-5 minutes lectures with a total of 2 hours playtime.
Number of Students: 4544 students (at time of writing).
Recommended Skill Level: Anyone, New Parents, Grandparents, People who work with children
Child Age Ranges: All, 0-18
Each bitesize video in this course is Robin speaking directly to you with the occasional graphic or text slide inserted to re-enforce the words. Robin is from South Africa and speaks with an SA accent as you’d expect, but he’s easy to understand and is engaging and speaks well.
The course is split into an Overview and 3 Skill sections. Skill 1 covers getting kids to ‘Co-Operate’, skill 2 is on ‘Boundaries’ and skill 3 covers ‘Perseverance’. Each of the 3 skill sections has between 8 to 10 videos which cover the skill itself, examples of how to use it, how to use it through different age ranges and ideas to try if it doesn’t work as you’d expect!
Robin Booth – Your Instructor
Robin Booth a family man who works often with children. He’s from Cape Town, South Africa. Robin is described as an international parenting expert, coach and (I’m guessing in his spare time :)) is also school principal. He is the founder of the Synergy Schooling Approach. This approach demonstrates how personal and academic excellence can easily be achieved when a teacher uses skills in boosting self esteem and developing the child’s internal motivation for success.
Many schools in South Africa include Robin’s workshops with full attendance by all parents, and as part of the teacher training programme as they have proven so successful.
Review
This course contains 3 real usable language skills that will change the way to talk to children. Each is given with good ‘real world’ examples that cover situations you have probably encountered. The examples are also expanded to give you ways to apply them to children of different age ranges. There’s also a section for each on what to try if you don’t think ideas will work for you.
Each of the skills is pretty easy to remember, and to master if you give them some conscious effort and practice a little beforehand. You really don’t need to sit through 2 hours of video to understand the principle. But listening to all the examples does help to re-enforce how you’d use each idea in different situations and how you can expand upon things if you don’t feel they’re going to work first time.
Of the three skills, I’d already been introduced to the concept of giving children ‘choices’ to help diffuse difficult situations and get them to co-operate. But watching the videos with examples is refreshing and also added the 3rd option idea which I hadn’t fully appreciated before.
The final 2 skills however on how to set boundaries and how to properly offer encouragement were interesting and I can see myself applying them the next time I’m in those particular situations.
All in all this is an interesting course, it’s engaging, easy to follow, quick to take and offers a lot of real-world advice with good examples of how to use it.
Major Takeaways
If you need something doing, then give your children empowering choices. This gives them a sense of independence and a wish to see how you an accommodate their needs. Allowing them to create their own choice is a great backup option when your options don’t work. The things you want them to do (your boundary) should be stated as general rules, and not as things you want them to do.
“Don’t do that” isn’t the correct way to address a child. “We do this” is.
Empathize with you kids when they can’t do something, they don’t want you to lower the bar, they wan’t help stepping up to it. But the help might need to be conditionally offered. “That’s tough to do, I have some ideas how I can help, would you like me to share them?”.
