5 hours ago
5
One of the most frustrating aspects of parenting is having to force your kids to do something they will undoubtedly enjoy. The effort required to get them out of the house for football practice, a museum visit or a swim at the beach can often outweigh any potential reward (a temporary reprieve from holiday boredom, for example).
Couples talk about love languages. Parents are more familiar with the multifarious languages of no. These range from blunt refusal through to nuclear meltdowns and very temporary and highly specific vision loss – the latter rendering essential objects such as clothes and shoes invisible, even within a high-contrast setting.
So much of parenting is about teaching our children to say yes. To vegetables. To swimming lessons. To situations that might – at first – edge them out of their comfort zone. Basically to say yes to whatever it is that we as parents have decided might be best for them.
There are, of course, perils with this approach. Our youngest came home from primary school a few weeks ago with a wounded hand after being told she had to complete 50 lengths of the monkey bars to be admitted to an exclusive “club”. She was not comforted when I suggested, given the evidence, that this might be a club for morons. The first rule of Moron Club, I reminded her, is don’t try to join Moron Club.
At a time when we are more conscious of consent, empowering our kids with the confidence to say no feels increasingly important. Thinking back to my own young adulthood, there were so many poor decisions made because it felt socially fatal – not to mention rude – to turn someone down.
It doesn’t help that so much of our culture is centred around the joy of saying yes. You don’t have to be Yes Man (comedian Danny Wallace wrote a memoir about the life-changing power of saying yes to everything) to feel that to decline an offer is to lose out on a potentially enriching or indulgent experience. This is the purpose of marketing, after all – to create a desire and immediately weaken your ability to resist it. Eat the chocolate. Bet on the horses. Buy the car. Our whole economy is driven by the power of yes.
When I was an early career teacher, the best advice I was ever given was “don’t respond until you’ve received the same email three times”. Obviously, this excluded genuinely urgent communications and emails from concerned parents, but did provide a buttress against any obligation to overcommit.
As with many care-based organisations, schools tend to rely on good people doing too much. My mentor had sensed in me an eagerness to please that, unprotected, would have seen me press-ganged into every committee and volunteer gig going.
If there’s one good reason to empower children with the confidence to say no, it’s to help them resist impulsiveness and build reflection into the decision-making process. After all, there is an inherent pause to the word “no”. Not every decision has to be made in the moment. It’s OK to ask for time to consider. Parents of overly impulsive children will probably be familiar with the importance of mindfulness, freezes and “stopping” skills.
Starting from a position of “no” is really asking children – however their brains may be wired – to think further into the future than the next 10 seconds. There is value too in teaching them it is OK to change your mind. That a tentative yes can become a firm no – and vice versa.
The neat trick here, from a parent’s perspective, is this is also how we get them to say yes to the unpleasant things. There are rewards – and even pleasures – to eating vegetables, to maths homework and to football practice that might not be immediately apparent. Rewards that, on pause and reflection, transcend the impulsive no.
In other words, by teaching our kids that they have the ability to say no, we’re giving them better reasons to say yes. Learning to say no won’t necessarily mean they’re cutting themselves off from new friends or experiences. The sad truth is, since becoming a No Person, I haven’t really ended up doing less things. I still end up ridiculously overcommitted.
What has changed is I now feel happier about these commitments. When I know I could have said no, I have to accept that, on some level, I must have wanted to say yes. Knowing that I chose to do something difficult or without obvious pleasures can be a salve and means I have to look a little deeper at my motivations. The reward – or at least, the purpose – must be there somewhere.
Helping children take the time to identify that reward might just be the key to helping them say yes to broccoli and no to Moron Club.
