It’s fascinating how persuasion techniques -- even though they’re pretty mechanical at their foundations -- warp and shift in specific contexts. Business persuasion is different than political persuasion, religious persuasion is different than relationship persuasion. They all share techniques, but the way those techniques play out, soooo different.
Thus, one of my favorite persuasion projects -- Persuasion Training for Parents. Which is my way of getting parents around the globe to think of themselves as persuaders. As people who need to influence their children. Rather than command their children.
I love this project. Because it has such personal, and widespread, applications in the world.
When I was a professor, I always started my persuasion courses with the question, “Who intends to spank their kids?”
Invariably, hands went up. Usually from a majority of students.
“And when are you going to stop spanking them?” I asked. And when I got unsure responses, I offered the actual answer -- “You’ll stop when they get big enough to hit you back.”
Which is the general system. We only hit children because they have no possibility of defense. They’re really the only people in our society on which we allow physical force to be legally used.
And we even allow weapons. (My mother preferred a ping pong paddle with raised rubber circles on it. Not implying she “abused” us. Just our behinds and the backs of our legs.)
The justification for using physical force on kids is that they can’t rationally process other forms of influence. And that you need to effectively affect them so that they don’t do dangerous things. And that you don’t actually harm them, just temporarily hurt them. (Um, you remember being spanked, right? Do you know why? Because it’s traumatic. Being attacked by a massive human, who is obviously angry, and who tells you this is for your own good. You remember it for a lifetime. Way past when you remember what you were spanked for.)
Those justifications just don’t hold up. The only real justification for hitting kids? You run out of ideas, you're frustrated, and don’t know any other options. You haven’t been trained in a wider, better array of techniques. Most parents understand influence techniques like Request. Reminders. Command. Threat. Negotiation. Begging. Refusals. Arguments. Repetition. And Punishment.
Most of which you should never use with kids. Ever. I co-raised two kids. I didn't tell them no. I didn't hit them. I didn't even punish them.
Because I knew how to persuade them. I trained them to be persuaded by me. And to persuade me in return. I did this very, very consciously. (Might as well put my Rhetoric PhD to good use.)
My kids were 20-year persuasion experiments. (Still are, kind of. But it’s harder to continue their training when they don’t live with me anymore.)
I train parents on how to raise persuasion-trained kids. Because it’s not the standard way of doing things. But it’s a better way. It has almost unlimited benefits, far beyond just getting more peace in your family because you’re not always fighting kids who are fighting your control.
Some of the mega-areas I teach parents are:
() Rhetoric Training
() Communication Training
() Rationality Training
() Power Training
() Relationship Training
() Verbotens Training
() Valence Training
() Improvement Training
() Conflict Training
() Emotion Training
() Rebellion Training
() Deviance Training
() Praxis Training
() Comedy Training
Pretty big human concepts floating around in there. But it ultimately all makes really good sense when you see it laid out as a program for kid raising.
I’ll follow up with micro-posts about Persuasion Training for Parents in the future. So much useful info, and so many fun kids stories in there, it’s one of my favorite persuasion applications by far.