Tool Excerpt and Meta Description: Learn how to help your three and four-year-old effectively follow directions, develop social-emotional skills, and build a strong foundation for success at home and preschool.

Following Directions

Now Is the Right Time!

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you can be deliberate in offering instructions to help your child respond and follow directions. Your four-year-old can now follow simple instructions, including up to three steps. Understanding multiple-step directions engages their short-term and complex working memory, an executive function that requires practice and development over time. 

Children ages three to four must follow directions to get along at home and succeed at preschool. Whether they are taking part in a daily routine like bedtime preparations, following safety instructions like looking both ways before street crossing, or cooperating with the teacher at preschool, they must be able to follow directions. Though telling your child to do something may seem simple enough, the process of a child listening and engaging in several steps given in an instruction necessitates several brain functions in addition to motivational factors. Children can vary widely in their ability to carry out instructions with accuracy.

In the case of short-term memory, you might ask your child who is playing chef, “Would you grab the butter, cheese, and milk out of the refrigerator?” they need to hold those three items in mind as they move to the kitchen. In a preschool setting, as another example, a teacher may say, “At the end of our class, we’ll move to our snack tables, and you can choose two items from each bowl.” Students have to retain that information as the teacher moves on and plan for what they will need to do when they come to the time when they have to implement the teacher’s instructions. This expectation utilizes complex working memory and can be more challenging for students.1

Following directions can involve all five core social and emotional competencies. Children may need to be aware of their strengths and limitations (self-awareness) to complete the tasks given. They must use their self-management skills to wait and focus on what’s been instructed when necessary. They may require social awareness or empathy as they work to understand the needs, feelings, and thoughts of the one giving them directions. They will use their relationship skills by listening actively to what’s required. They will also use their responsible decision-making skills to decide whether and how to follow through with a request or instruction.

Some parents and those in a parenting role may feel frustrated and even angry when their children do not follow their directions as they requested. A parent or someone in a parenting role may perceive a child not following their directions as defiant or disrespectful, but there may be another reason for the behavior. There are several factors to consider when a child does not follow a direction. When faced with this situation, a parent may ask themselves:

• Does the child have the required capacity and skills to follow directions?
• Does the child have any barriers to completing the tasks, including motivational or environmental ones (like a sibling distracting them)?
• Have you communicated how a child can best understand, listen, retain, and act successfully?

Building a trusting relationship can provide the foundational safety and motivation for your child to follow directions. Using teachable moments that grow your child’s skills can be transformational in preparing your child to follow directions at home and school. The steps below include specific, practical strategies along with effective conversation starters.

Why Following Directions?

Through sensitive, caring interactions with you, children learn about themselves and how they relate to others. These interactions impact their ability to focus and follow directions when needed. Your focus on creating a trusting relationship is essential to developing skills, abilities, and motivations to follow directions.

Today, in the short term, preparing your child to follow directions can create

• a greater understanding of the connection between your child’s feelings and their behaviors
• competence in managing and executing multiple requests
• trust in each other that you are helping them learn and act in ways that will help them succeed at home and school

Tomorrow, in the long term, it will help your child

• build skills in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships, and responsible decision-making
• learn independence and self-sufficiency

Five Steps for Following Directions

This five-step process helps you understand your child’s motivation for following directions and build the necessary skills. The same process can also be used to address other parenting issues (learn more about it).

Three-to-four-year-olds’ communication will be limited to five to six-word sentences, and they will cry to communicate with you. Paying close attention to your child’s facial expressions, body movements, and words helps you better understand what they are trying to convey. Your efforts to learn from your child build trust and create empathetic interactions that let them know you genuinely care about their thoughts and feelings.

This will make a big difference in setting the stage for learning new skills and following your directions. Watching your child make choices will help you understand how much they have learned. Every child is different, and your child may change daily in how responsive they are to your instructions depending on whether they are tired, hungry, with new people, or other factors. You are the person who will know your child’s cues better than anyone else, and you will be able to anticipate if the conditions are right for them to be able to follow directions.

Three essential factors can influence a child’s ability to follow through fully on your directions.
1. They must feel they have the skills and ability to perform the task they are asked to perform. Some will be willing to try a new task without much practice, but others may feel they require competence before performing a task.
2. They must be able to retain the request (working memory), especially if there are multiple steps or requests in the request, and focus on implementing them.
3. They will also require motivation to follow through on the given tasks. The conditions for motivation come from a safe, trusting relationship but can also be influenced by feelings.

You can ask questions to gauge whether these conditions have been met so your child is ready to follow directions.

Actions

You might ask your child:

• Is this task something you’ve done before? 
• If not, can we practice together?

Additionally, you may ask yourself:

• What kind of support might they need to follow through on the request?
• If they have done it before, what was your experience last time you did this task? How did they feel about it? How did you think about it?

Children ages three to four are still learning to understand their feelings, other people’s feelings, and how their actions affect others. So they may not be able to answer how they feel. This feelings list can help. You might say:

“I noticed your eyebrows are scrunched, and I’m wondering if you are confused?” or “You look frustrated. Is that right?”

Your young children will need your support to figure this out. When both you and your child are calm, reflect on your child’s feelings so you can be prepared to help. Ask yourself:

• “Does my child have an unmet need?” They might need someone to listen or give them attention, some alone time, or some help so they can be successful at something they are trying to do. And you’ll often have to guess needs since they are not yet adept at communicating them.
• Use your best listening skills! Listen closely to your child’s concerns without projecting your thoughts and feelings. What are they focused on? It helps to use a paraphrasing technique to ensure you fully understand what your child is communicating. Sometimes, we can identify the feelings behind their words, including a fear of failure.
• Explore the mind-body connection. In calmer moments with your child, ask, “How does your body feel now?” See how descriptively they can list their physical signs of well-being. Now, ask, “How does your body feel when you are frustrated?” Every person’s physical experience will be different. Find out how your child feels and make the connection between those symptoms and the usual feelings they are having.

If Your Child Has Not Followed Your Directions…

If your child has already shown that they are unable or unwilling to follow your directions, you could feel frustrated or even angry. So, step back before you move forward with these questions. Before you can get input from your child to understand (and help them know) what they are feeling, you both need to be calm. Take your pause to become quiet before responding. Your child will not learn from the situation if you or they are upset.

• Ask yourself if your child is hungry or tired. You could offer a snack or offer to have your child take some time to rest.
• Check on how you are feeling. If you are angry, frustrated, or overwhelmed, take a “parenting time out” and take several deep breaths (it really does help) or sit quietly for a few minutes.
• If your child’s basic needs, like hunger or tiredness, are not issues, take additional steps to help them calm down. This might involve offering a hug or helping them take deep breaths.
• Often, young children need you to walk through an unfamiliar task with them. If they cannot follow directions, consider teaching them again by modeling the action (doing it yourself in front of them) and then doing it with them.

The fundamental purpose of following directions is to grow new skills and the ability to focus and persevere when requests are made that align with your child’s success. Learning new skills requires modeling, practice, support, and recognition.

Learning about your child’s developmental milestones can help you have reasonable expectations for your child.2

• Three to four-year-olds copy or mimic adult words and actions.
• Three-four-year-olds are growing in empathy for others and will attempt to comfort another crying child and show affection for others without prompting.
• Three-four-year-olds can converse by offering two to three sentences but still need a feeling vocabulary. They cannot describe their body sensations when upset or dealing with big feelings, and a feeling vocabulary takes longer to develop.
• Three- to four-year-olds are eager to play pretend independently and cooperatively with other children. Through play, children gain vital practice with all of their developmental milestones.
• Three-four-year-olds can show defiant behavior and test boundaries as they learn about the rules and attempt to understand your values.
• Three-four-year-olds can show a broader range of emotions.
• Three-four-year-olds may begin to experience separation anxiety when you leave them.
• Three-four-year-olds can imagine what response might be appropriate or comforting in a particular situation.

Teaching is different from just telling. It builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and prepares your child for success. Teaching also involves modeling and practicing the positive behaviors you want to see, promoting skills, and preventing problems. It is also an opportunity to reflect on meaningful, logical consequences if expectations are unmet.

Actions

• Pay attention to HOW you make your request, including:
  • Getting down on your child’s level
  • Making eye contact
  • Keeping the request short and direct. Begin your sentence with the action verb you want to be performed.  “Take my hand as we cross the street.”
  • Moving your body in the direction of the action. If you want your child to avoid a place (like the road), move your body away and beckon them to follow
  • Offering wait time
• Teach your child the skills required to follow your directions. Did you ask him to put his toy away in a particular bin? Demonstrate first (watching you enact the skill increases a child’s ability to act!).
• Model active listening while interacting with your child. Modeling listening skills can be one of the greatest teaching tools.
• Pretend play through the instructions together. Laugh and make it enjoyable.
• Listen for thought and feeling. In addition to listening to what your child says, see if you can identify the unspoken thought and feeling behind the content, in other words, the context. Offer feeling words to practice growing their emotional awareness.

Practice can be pretend play, cooperatively completing the task together, or trying out a task with you as a coach and ready support. Practice is necessary for children to internalize new skills. Practice makes vital new brain connections that strengthen each time your child performs a new action.

Actions

• Communicate directions in ways that can be well-heard and understood. Get physically on your child’s level. Make eye contact. Use a calm voice.  Use the action verb first in a direct, simple sentence. “Put your plate in the sink.” Use visuals like motions, hand signals, drawings, or written lists.
• Use pretend play to practice! Engage stuffed friends, dolls, or action figures to act out requests. Have your child demonstrate through those toys.
• Work up to multi-step directions. Practice a two-step direction and see how it goes. If successful, move up to a three-step direction.
• Accept all feelings. They will play a role in whether or not your child is motivated to follow your directions. If you will help your child manage their biggest feelings, it is essential to acknowledge and accept their feelings — even ones you don’t like. When your child is upset, consider your response. Instead of focusing on their actions or the problem, focus on their feelings FIRST. You could say, “I hear you’re upset. What can you do to help yourself feel better? Would your calm down space help you feel better?” Then, try the directions again after the calm-down space has helped.
• Use “Show me…” statements with a positive tone and body language to express excitement and curiosity. When a child learns a new ability, they are eager to show it off! Give them that chance. Say, “Show me how you can brush your teeth.” This practice will offer valuable practice in working up to a multi-step routine.
• Offer limited and authentic choices when communicating directions. Offering them an option, even if small—“Do you want to put the truck in the bin or the top?”—can return a sense of control to their lives. It also offers valuable practice in responsible decision-making.
• Recognize effort using “I notice…” statements like, “I notice how you listened to the full directions and remembered what to do. That’s excellent!”
• Follow through on repairing harm. When your child has caused harm by not following your directions, they need your guidance, encouragement, and support to fix it. They also may require more practice. You may need to hold their hand through repairing harm, and that’s okay! They are learning the invaluable skill of responsible decision-making.

At this point, you’ve taught your child some new strategies. You’ve practiced together. Now, you can offer support by reteaching, monitoring, coaching, and, when appropriate, reflecting on logical consequences. Parents and those in a parenting role naturally provide support when they see their child fumble in a situation where they need help. This is no different.

Actions

• Ask critical questions to support their skills. For example, “How can we make clean up together fun? Maybe we can put on music and dance while we clean?”
• Learn about development. Each new age and stage will present differing challenges, stress, frustration, and anger. We, as adults, can be more empathetic and patient when we understand what our children are attempting to learn.
• Promote an “I can” belief. Children need to hear that you believe in their ability to learn anything with time and hard work.
• Don’t move on quickly if your child shows interest in trying something new. Children often need more time to stick with a challenge or pursue a goal. Be sure to wait long enough for your child to show you they are competent. Your waiting could make all the difference in whether they can gain skills over time.
• Reflect on how your child feels when they have mastered a new request. You can offer reflections like:
  • “I see you put your truck and your bunny in the bins right where they’re supposed to go!” Naming their success will help to grow confidence.
• Foster a safe, trusting relationship. When your child does not follow directions, be sure you assume that they have more learning to do instead of assuming defiance. Get curious and find out what’s going on for them.
• Stay engaged. Work together on ideas for new and different ways to communicate directions or instructions. That can offer additional support and motivation for your child when challenging issues arise.

Learning new behaviors to replace inappropriate behaviors takes time. Children ages three to four will likely not do it right the first time (or even the second or third!). That’s OK. What’s important is that you approach guidance and discipline for skill building by understanding feelings, teaching new behaviors, and practicing while maintaining a healthy, supportive, loving relationship with your child. Your healthy, supportive, loving relationship with your child is most important.

No matter how old your child is, your positive reinforcement and encouragement have a significant impact.

If your child is working to grow their skills – even in small ways – it will be worthwhile to recognize it. Your recognition can go a long way in promoting positive behaviors and expanding your child’s confidence. Your recognition encourages safe, secure, and nurturing relationships — a foundation for strong communication and a healthy relationship with you as they grow.

There are many ways to reinforce your child’s efforts. It is essential to distinguish between three types of reinforcement: recognition, rewards, and bribes. These three distinct parenting behaviors have different impacts on your child’s behavior.

Recognition occurs after you observe the desired behavior in your child. Noticing and naming the specific behavior you want to reinforce is vital in promoting more of it. For example, “You asked for help understanding what I was asking of you — love that!” or “You picked up your game and put your shoes away when it was time — I appreciate that!”

Recognition can include nonverbal acknowledgment such as a smile, high five, or hug.

Rewards can be helpful in certain situations by providing a concrete, timely, and positive incentive for doing a good job.  A reward is determined beforehand so the child knows what to expect. A reward could be used to teach positive behavior or break a bad habit. The goal should be to help your child progress to a time when the reward will no longer be needed. If used too often, rewards can decrease a child’s internal motivation.

Unlike a reward, bribes aren’t planned ahead of time and generally happen when a parent or someone in a parenting role is in the middle of a crisis (like in the grocery store checkout line and a child is having a tantrum. To avoid disaster, a parent offers to buy a sucker if the child will stop the tantrum). While bribes can be helpful in the short term to manage stressful situations, they will not grow lasting motivation or behavior change and should be avoided.

Actions

• Recognize and call out when things are going well. It may seem obvious, but it’s easy not to notice when everythmoveslong smoothly. Noticing and naming the behavior provides the necessary reinforcement that you see and value your child’s choice. For example, when children complete their homework on time, a short, specific call out is all that’s needed: “I noticed that when you got frustrated, you took a break, and then we worked together to pick up your room. Excellent.”
• Recognize small steps along the way. Don’t wait for significant accomplishments—like the full bedtime routine going smoothly—to recognize effort. Remember that your recognition can work as a tool to promote more positive behaviors. Find small ways your child is making an effort and let them know you see them.
• Build celebrations into your routine. Promote joy and happiness by laughing, singing, dancing, hugging, and snuggling to appreciate one another.

Closing

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that will strengthen your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role on many other issues and develop essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child. Through this tool, children can become more self-aware, deepen their social awareness, exercise their self-management skills, work on their relationship skills, and demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making.