How to talk so kids will listen

A guide to practical and effective communication with children. The authors share insights and suggestions to help break the pattern of arguments and cope with your child's negative feelings, express your anger without being hurtful, engage your child's cooperation, set clear limits and maintain goodwill, use alternatives to punishment and resolve conflicts.

What Hacker News says

monknomoJun 2026

How to Talk so Kids Will Listen (and How to Listen so Kids Will Talk) is excellent

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kleer001Mar 2023

Child care. For my 2yo and 2mo. It's similar to optimally dealing with adults (NVC and such), but consistently over-melodramatic adults with developmental issues.

The "How to talk so kids will listen" is a great series of books.

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kqrApr 2022

Some authors take multiple books to fully flesh out the ideas outlined in the first, so there are some doubles recommended here.

I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.

1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.

2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.

3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.

4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.

5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.

6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.

7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.

8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.

9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.

10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.

11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.

I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.

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MandieDNov 2021

Solid parenting advice, or a consulting technique: the “wish list” from “How to talk so kids will listen, how to listen so kids will talk”, or putting something that seems ridiculous into the backlog to keep the meeting moving.

Wonderful comment that brought this book and idea to my attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27468582

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gregwebsNov 2020

IMHO PG's best essay since thinking for yourself is a complex topic that underlies many of his previous essays yet is explained so well here. A few things stuck out to me that could have deeper explanations:

I suspect conformity has just as strong of a relationship with childhood environment as genetics. Ironically heavy-handed parents trying to create conformity can create rebels. Loving and understanding parents can create conformists unless they emphasize independent thinking. Personally I try to avoid telling children what exactly to do and try to listen to them, essentially treating them like adults: this is explained in the book "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen".

"Resistance to being told what to think" is given in this essay as working with curiosity, but I think it can also have a negative feedback. The independent thinker can be less curious about ideas they are told by someone else. However, the same phenomenon may help explain the mentioned individualization of curiosity: the ideas the critical thinker thinks of as coming from themselves naturally generate curiosity in those areas.

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kqrAug 2020

It doesn't matter where you are in the org chart. Being a good leader is about prestige and respect, not dictatorial power.

With prestige comes attention to what you say and do, and ability to influence decisions.

If you feel like the middle manager is powerless, these are exactly the types of books to read. Other recommendations include High Output Management, Drive, How To Talk So Kids Will Listen (I'm serious), Turn the Ship Around, Out of the Crisis, and more.

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