Too many comments for me to address them all, but I have a few general comments to add to this discussion.
It seems to me that as parents, there will always be a balance between doing things in the way you feel will have the absolute best 'chinuch' effect on them, and doing things in whatever way solves the issue the quickest/easiest. If you can always do it the best/chinuch way, good for you, your children will probably be better off for it. But unless you're always doing it the quickest/easiest way, don't beat yourself up about it, you're not permanently damaging your child or anything. Sometimes we have to make choices between wasting an hour that we don't have to spare trying to get a child to do something, and figuring out a quick trick, that may not be the absolute best method of parenting, to get them to do it quickly. I hope that makes sense to people.
As far as the actual methods, you have to find what works for each child at any particular time. Every child will be different, and each child changes over time in this regard (very rapidly I might add).