Kids can be avid negotiators. Learning to address this is a big challenge for parents!
When raising children, we often value their intellect as a high-priority area for development. This means they’ll need to learn to make choices and formulate arguments and opinions. All of these skills will serve them well later in life.
However, kids can also have desires and impulses that they feel more strongly than anything else at any given moment. Whether it’s a constant refusal to pick stuff up or do chores, an urge to beat on younger siblings, or simply pushing for a privilege they didn’t have, they’ll do anything to achieve this impulsive goal. They can often use their new-found argumentative skills to try to guilt or convince parents.
Read on to find out how you can exert your best judgement as a parent to help your kids learn and grow from their impulses.
Pick Your Battles
The first tip for parents who are confronted with an insistent child is to let them win sometimes. Messy teenagers who refuse to pick up their clothes or participate in household chores may never learn if you’re constantly serving as a psychological crutch, reminding them they need to keep their things tidy.
Pick your battles: decide what parts of your child’s behaviour are the most unacceptable, and focus on those. Make a list! Seriously: write down everything you and your kid fight about, and pick only the most important things. For the rest, let it all.
While this solution is far from ideal, it will reduce the tension in the household while keeping things at an acceptable level of tidiness. Let them learn from their own mistakes! We bet they’ll soon realize you were right all along about certain things.
Listen Up
The privileges your child is asking for may seem a bit much to you now, but they often reveal reasonable desires for independence. If your 5-year-old is asking for more makeup privileges or wants to swim without floaties, try meeting them halfway: makeup is OK if I put it on you the first few times, and then teach you how to not go overboard. You could also try saying that makeup is only OK on special occasions (and never at school).
Swimming without floaties is may be OK, but we have to be in the water together at all times. IMPORTANT: for the floaties thing, safety comes first. If anything your child asks for might have an impact on their safety, you should assert your authority firmly. Remember, you are always the adult and you have the final say.
Your authority will never be in question, but you’ll still be granting your children some independence they will eventually learn from.
The same goes for curfews. If you want your teen back by 11:00 pm, you could start by lowballing them (say 9:00 pm), and then let them negotiate you up to 11:00. They’ll never suspect your trickery, and they’ll have learned in the process that they can be assertive and still get acceptable results.
Another trick applies to when your kids ask for something big: for example, a tattoo, a piercing or something of that nature. Just talk to them calmly about it and lay out the implications. Then, tell them if they still want it in a certain amount of time, they can ask for it again.
Negociation
Negotiation is a key aspect of forging a respectful relationship with your kids. If you’re having an issue that keeps popping up, address it calmly with them, in a non-confrontational moment when you are both in an open state of mind. This is very similar to a negotiation where you have a mediator come in and help the two parties come to an agreement.
In this case, the “mediator” is the calm situation. You should both be in a better state to understand how and why your past arguments are unproductive.
Once this calm and open discussion is established, it’s time to listen first, then make your point. If both you and your kid feel respected and understood, a compromise will be much easier to reach.
Another good negotiation tactic is to involve an actual mediator. This could be another parent, a teacher or even another kid. If your kid hears it from someone else, they may be more inclined to listen (remember, kids are impulsive, and may suffer from the delusion that you are the only one disagreeing with them).
Arguing is Optional
Finally, it’s crucial to realize this: arguing is COMPLETELY optional, and it’s often your choice whether to engage in an argument or not. If you’re enforcing a consequence on your child (such as grounding them or adding extra chores) and they start arguing against it, it’s your choice to continue the argument or leave the room. You hold all of the power in that situation.
If your child is doing something to trigger you (for example, leaving a mess in the kitchen), it’s entirely your choice how to react. You can start an argument. However, if you’re always starting arguments and it never results in a positive outcome, why continue? Try a different approach. Maybe cleaning up the mess and then talking about it calmly would work. Maybe you should stop buy that particular food for some time. There are many options!