The case of stubborn advisee

I am sure, seasoned advisers must have dealt with this situation before; hence the question:

How do you deal with stubborn advisee's who do not take any of your advice regarding courses, research, experiments, way to do experiments, writing etc.

1) Do you push for sometime, give them sound advice and let them do whatever they want?

OR

2) Do you give them advice and then push them to follow what you are suggesting (because you know better)?

Style 1 is not that hard; I give advice; student wont listen and I will let them be. The chips may fall where they may. This is easy in practice but there are funds being given to the student and time being wasted (on his stupid ideas)

Style 2 a lot harder to practice and implementation. Not to mention a drain on my limited energy resource.


So blogosphere what has worked for you? and what hasn't?

How to distribute funds to students?

Since I am new at this, I have been thinking a lot about this: how do I make decisions to distribute funds to students?

My sociopaths brain says that I should just look at  their progress: more number of papers, more successful projects, more funds from my side.

My compassionate brain says: I have to look for other factors as well; for example if some one has 4 kids to support and they are lagging a bit I should still support them with whatever funds I have. I don't want their kids to suffer.

I am sure there are other factors that people take into account when making funding decisions for students. Since I am new at this it took me more than 2 weeks of thinking before I could make summer appointments for my students.

How do you make your funding decisions? and what are the factors that you take into account. Do you listen to your sociopath brain only? compassionate brain only? both?