Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene? How did you reconcile the difference?
For eating, I made healthy foods available that they liked. This worked really well. One son has two conditions that can land a child in in-house hospital treatment for aversion to eating and he never had issues like that.
For trying new foods, they had to try it, not finish it. I never made them do things like clean their plate. Instead, I planned ahead for how much I expected people to eat at the meal.
I always had a good reason for what I was asking and it very rarely came to "because I said so." On the rare occasions where it did hit that point, they went along with it because it was rare, so they were convinced I had a good reason even if I couldn't get them to understand it.
I have one major rule - if I give an absolute command, it must be obeyed immediately without question. In exchange, I promise to do it very rarely and explain my reasons as the earliest possible convenience. This has helped in situations where it wasn’t practical for me to physically drag them - get out of the way of the car, come towards me NOW and away from that crumbling cliff. Stuff like that.
Most other things fall into place just by showing by example. Show interest in their homework, talk excitedly about science, etc, they do their best in school.
As a parent of teenagers... omg, yes. LOL. I think it's as much because they're teenagers preparing to leave the nest as much as anything.
That doesn't mean the teen years didn't have some bumps. The worst of that was cleared up by explaining to my children that they were being flooded with hormones and a side effect of high levels of testosterone is aggression and anger.
So if they were feeling very, very angry, it wasn't because they were being subjected to extreme injustice they had never before seen. It was because they were hormonal.
That conversation ended with the punchline "You're problem is called testosterone, not my bitch mother." which caused everyone to crack up.
After that I occasionally would say "You sound like an icky, hormone soaked teenager." And my son would say "I am an icky hormone soaked teenager" and he would try to tone down whatever made me say that and I would try to cut him some slack for being hormone soaked and not entirely in control of his big, fat mouth because of it.
Different kinds of families, I guess =)
We've also taught a similar one in "your body, your choice." I can confirm some folks look at us sideways when we agree with our kids choice to not hug or kiss.
If there is one thing I'd want my kids to know it is how to establish and confidently hold a boundary.
I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.
I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.
I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.
This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.
If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.