Tip #1 - It's not wrong to use your children's fears against them

God gave children fears for a reason, so parents could use those fears to get their children to do what they want them to do.

Example:
Before I get into the example there are a couple of things you need to know.
1st Hyrum's scared of spiders
2nd Hyrum's room is in the basement
3rd We have spiders in the basement
4th A week or so before this happened I had noticed a small spider living behind Hyrum's bed and I hadn't got around to killing it
5th We live in an old house so the walls are made of plaster
6th Hyrum likes to make holes in the walls

So here's the example. We have told Hyrum (he was 4 when this happened) a million times not to make holes in the walls. Any time he finds a crack or hole he tries to make it bigger by digging at it with anything he can get his hands on. It drives me crazy because I have to go fix the hole he just made. One day we were in the living room and Hyrum started picking at a small hole in the wall. I was sick of telling him to stop so I told him that spiders can get into the house through the holes that he makes in the walls. I said that the spiders would come in through the holes and climb into his bed. This freaked him out and he stopped digging at the hole. Well, that night when I was putting him to bed I remembered that there was a spider living behind his bed. So to reinforce the story I had told him about the spiders getting into his bed, I pulled his bed out and showed him the spider that had "come in through the hole he made and climbed into his bed." This really really really freaked him out and he has never made another hole in my walls. In fact it worked so well that when my 2 year old started digging at holes in the walls he told her to stop and warned her about the spiders that would get into her bed. Mission accomplished.