Sometimes in life you need to manipulate your children into doing things or not doing things.  Steve talks a little bit about that in today's Daddy Tips.

  1. Today’s first Daddy Tip is to not do something that my wife and I did a lot until we realized how bad it was. Don’t laugh when your toddler talks back to your spouse. Charlotte likes to get in some backtalk from time to time and we used to crack up when she did it because we thought it was cute. But then we started to notice that Charlotte was talking back much more because she thought we enjoyed it. So, now we have to cover our faces and go into the other room to laugh when Charlotte says “whatever mom”.
  2. The second Daddy Tip this week is for parents with two or more kids. Make sure that you have all of the same milestones documented for them. If you saved one umbilical cord, save all of your kids umbilical cords. If you have a video of one kid rolling over for one of the first times, make sure you have that for all of your kids. If you do this, you can avoid your kid asking “where’s my video daddy?”
  3. And the final Daddy Tip of the week is to give the illusion of choice to your toddler. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s simple. All you have to do when your kid is refusing to do something is to give them a choice of two things to do, but make one of them really bad. As an example, Charlotte always fights having to take a bath, so when it’s bath time and she refuses, I just ask her “do you want to take a bath or get your nails cut?” See, she hates getting her nails cut so her answer is always a bath and then she gets right in. And then when it’s time to cut her nails I ask her if she wants to clean the toilet or get her nails cut.

And now it’s time for an awesome Dad Joke!

Q: What do you call a paper airplane that doesn’t fly?
A: Stationary

Listen to the entire segment below:

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