Attention is the currency, and you are spending it on the wrong things

Children run on adult attention, and they do not sort it into good and bad. Attention is attention.

Look at where yours goes on an average day. Almost all of it is spent on things going wrong, because things going wrong are what interrupt you. The twenty minutes when they played quietly bought nothing, because you used those twenty minutes to answer an email.

So the swap is this. Catch the thing you want while it is happening, and say what you saw. That is all. You put your shoes on without being asked. You two sorted that out yourselves. You waited while I was on the phone.

Not praise of the child, which gets awkward fast. A description of what they did.

al-Ghazali states the first half of that as a rule, in the same passage of the Ihya' whose other half gave lesson two its escalator. Section 26814, in Arabic only, exactly as stored:

ثم مهما ظهر من الصبي خلق جميل وفعل محمود فينبغي أن يكرم عليه ويجازى عليه بما يفرح به ويمدح بين أظهر الناس

Our rendering: whenever a beautiful character or a praiseworthy act appears from the child, he should be honoured for it and rewarded for it with what pleases him and praised in front of people.

That is this step, written in the eleventh century, and the two lessons are quoting one continuous argument. Spend the attention on what appears and is good. Do not multiply the reproach. The refinement above, that it works better as a description of what the child did than as praise of the child, is modern and it is ours rather than his.