What's a Parent's Role?

Take our Authoritative Parenting Test

Find a family therapist near me

Counting gives kids a fair warning and the opportunity to choose compliance before consequences.

Counting fosters autonomy by giving kids time to shift gears and make good choices.

This strategy keeps parents calm and prevents repeated nagging or unpredictable reactions.

There is some talk among social media parenting influencers and “experts” that "counting down your kids" is a bad parenting strategy. As a clinical psychologist who conducted parenting studies throughout my doctoral degree, wrote a review paper on parenting strategies that has been cited over 1,000 times, and helps parents daily in my clinical practice, I can confidently say that counting down your kids is one of the best parenting strategies there is.

Counting down is when parents calmly and slowly count to five (or count backwards from 5 to 1) after they have given an instruction. If the child doesn’t listen before the parent gets to the last number, the parent gives a consequence for misbehavior. Initially, the consequence needs to be explicitly tied to the counting down. After the child learns how counting down works, parents can often just start counting when the child is misbehaving to change the child's behavior. Decades of behavioral parenting research supports both (a) counting down kids as a way to warn of an upcoming consequence if kids don’t listen (e.g., 1-2-3 Magic) and (b) what counting can help parents achieve, which is non-repetitive instruction-giving followed by time for the child to comply and negative consequences for noncompliance (e.g., Triple P, The Incredible Years, The Kazdin Method).

I have heard parenting people say things like “counting down kids isn't fair to kids" and “counting........

© Psychology Today