How do you get more help from your Husband?  Praise his effort!

Want your husband to help you out more? Of course you do.  So how can you get your husband to share the load?  Sounds overly simple, but it can pretty much work with anyone, Praise His Effort.

Men NEED respect!  Women NEED love!
According to my husband Jack as well as many experts in the fields of love, relationships, and psychology, men DO in fact NEED respect, and though women want and need to be treated with respect, it is not on the same level as a man’s NEED for respect.

In our cornerstone post, 15 Ways to Show RESPECT to your Husband, we gave a list of …you guessed it, 15 ways to show respect to your husband.  Welcome to part three in our follow-up series of posts where we discuss our suggestions in greater detail. You will find real life examples and be provided with ideas to help you find ways to strengthen your marriage while giving your husband the respect he needs.

Often husbands do help their wives with a task such as washing the dishes or folding the laundry only to be corrected for not doing it the “right” way at which point the husband thinks something along the lines of, “Really, here I am trying to do something nice, and all she is doing is complaining. Guess I won’t be helping her with this ever again, and maybe I won’t make the effort on anything else either.” Our husbands are trying to do something helpful and probably subconsciously expecting a compliment or a thank you, and instead, we just gripe.  Why in the world don’t we just say thank you and praise his effort?

For example, I recently observed a conversation where the woman commented to her husband that he had mowed the yard wrong. She told him that he should have mowed all of the front first, then the sides. Though there may have been a valid reason for her thought process, all it did was anger him and show him how unappreciated and (in his mind) disrespected he was.  Why not instead Praise his Effort which probably would have helped them to have a better day together and made him feel his effort was not in vain. [Read more…]