When thinking about negotiations, maybe you picture being at a car dealership, or hiring a contractor, or perhaps a complex business deal. Yes, these are all negotiations, but so might these be:
•What do you want for dinner tonight?
•Why can’t you drive me there right now?
•Can I have a cookie?
•Why isn’t your homework done yet?
When asked to recall the last time they negotiated (was it in the last hour, day, week, or month?), most people dig deep into their memories for one of the “big” kinds of negotiations. But in reality, most people negotiate every day. This is true for everyone but especially for parents, who may spend far more time than they realize negotiating with their kids every day.
Negotiating in your adult life (at work, for big purchases, in relationships, etc.) and negotiating at home with your kids can seem like two completely different things. Our adult negotiations can be big, important, defined events with clear goals and a beginning and an end. Or, they can be subtler attempts at persuasion, such as in a work situation where you need to rally support, gain resources, or obtain information. But in these cases, the key is that you’re interacting with another adult in a setting in which we all tend to play by the same rules of communication and common courtesy. You won’t necessarily get those same guarantees from your kids.
At home, there can be a lot more emotion involved. The relationships are often more important than the issues. The interactions are typically more spontaneous, and the goals are less clear. There can be additional weight put on every decision as you try to figure out whether the short-or long-term issues are more critical. “Can I have a cookie?” seems like an innocent enough request—until you think through the consequences of your answer. “If I say no, what kind of meltdown am I in for, and do I have the energy for it?” has to be weighed against “If I say yes, am I ruining their dinner and am I going to pay for that later with a grumpy kid or one who’s starving at bedtime? Or worse, am I setting a precedent here where they’ll expect a cookie every time they ask? Or even worse yet, am I ruining their taste for healthy food and setting them up for a lifetime of unhealthy eating?”
It’s no wonder that negotiating with your kids can seem daunting. Competent, capable, accomplished people go about their days successfully interacting with others, creating negotiated agreements on issues big and small, explicit and subtle—and then go home and stumble with their kids. This happens to everyone: business executives, psychologists, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and negotiations professors alike. Everyone negotiates, but it takes work to recognize each of these moments and figure out how to apply the know-how you use in other settings to your negotiations at home, where it feels like nobody is playing by the same rules.
Any time that you and another person have different preferences and are trying to come to an agreement about them, you’re having a negotiation. The topics covered in negotiations with your children may begin with discussions about bedtime or sweet treats, but they certainly don’t end there. You might be negotiating over money, time or effort, rules, behavior, privileges or punishments—the list goes on and on. Sometimes these conversations might only be a few words, and sometimes they can drag on for weeks. Some may happen in person, and others via text. Some sneak up on us, so that we don’t even recognize that we’re negotiating at all.
Negotiations with your kids are not battles that need to be won or lost, or a matter of either side getting their way. They are about happiness, satisfaction, and your overall relationship with your child. They’re a chance to solve a problem. To do this well, you need to understand what you want out of the situation and what your child wants out of the situation, and then find a solution that works. Sure, sometimes you’ll need to compromise (“meet in the middle”) and move on for the sake of efficiency, and sometimes you’ll just take charge and make a decision as the person with more power, but either way a deeper understanding of the needs of both sides can be used to craft better solutions. Creating this kind of “win–win” agreement takes more work, both in terms of more preparation ahead of time and more thought during the conversation itself, but this is the path to stronger agreements as well as good lessons for your kids on how to solve problems with others.
WHY IS THIS SO MUCH HARDER AT HOME THAN AT WORK?
People who have been successfully employed for years—individuals who feel empowered to execute multi-million dollar deals, persuade colleagues of ideas, handle conversations about raises and promotions—are still overwhelmed by their negotiations with their own kids. Even though these interactions may well require the very same skill set, the know-how that flows freely at work doesn’t seem to easily cross the threshold into the home. For one thing, there are actual differences in personal negotiations at home as opposed to professional ones, which primarily fall into four areas:
•Repetition. Negotiations with children tend to be more repetitive in nature than those at work. We end up engaging in the same conversations over and over again, and thus may fall into patterns and ruts with the ways we respond.
•Carry-over. Negotiations at home tend to be more linked to one another, which can feel like a snowballing effect from one situation to the next. Resentment can build up across these linked interactions. At work, situations are generally more independent from one another, and tend to have more definite start and end points. With kids, we do not have one negotiation but a series of negotiations that vary in magnitude across the day, the stage of development, or even the decade.
•Emotion. In close relationships, we can let ourselves get truly mad in a way we rarely do in other settings. Living closely is bound to create points of friction. At work, you may disagree with a colleague and may even get upset about the interaction, but for the most part, the problem itself is contained and task-based. Even better, at the end of the day you get to leave and hopefully put the whole thing behind you. At home, because we know that the close relationship is strong enough to withstand a bout of anger, we allow ourselves more freedom to express it than we might in a more professional relationship.
•Multiple agendas. At home, there are always three levels of negotiations going on at the same time.
•There is the specific issue at hand. What solution will work for both of us?
•There is the concern for the long-term effects of the decision itself. Am I setting a problematic precedent here?
•There is the concern for the long-term effects on your relationship with your child. Will this decision have spill-over consequences for us?
This is a lot of baggage to add on top of the already difficult task of negotiating.
On average, we negotiate with our kids six times a day (which leads to 182 negotiations a month). Each negotiation lasts an average of eight minutes, leading to forty-eight minutes a day of time spent in these interactions. These statistics come from a recent study of over 2,000 parents of kids between the ages of two and twelve.1 In case you wonder whether the negotiations that happen in your house are the same ones that happen in other families, these are the top five areas that monopolize our time:
•Food: children not eating everything on their plate, complaining of being hungry but being unwilling to eat anything healthy, or wanting a snack or sweet before dinner or too close to bedtime
•Chores: messy bedrooms, not helping with their share of the household chores, or leaving dirty laundry or dishes around
•Interactions: siblings fighting with each other
•Rules: trying to delay bedtime, wanting more time on electronic devices, avoiding homework, or not brushing their teeth
•Responsibility: losing or breaking items, or wanting to spend money on things
Undoubtedly, many interactions go smoothly. But of the 2,190 average negotiations a year, parents reported feeling successful only about half the time, and reported regularly giving in more than they wanted to, just to move forward. Yes, compromise is necessary and useful, but it can also lead to satisficing, which is the term for agreeing to any acceptable offer, even if it only barely meets your needs, instead of striving for a better agreement. We tend to satisfice more often when we’re challenged or worn out by the negotiation process, which happens a lot in negotiations with kids.
There are also the moments when parents cave in entirely to the demands of their children, maybe because they’re too frustrated to deal with the situation, maybe because they want to win the kids over and make them happy, or maybe because they are just plain exhausted. Some parents even try to opt out of dealing with their kids at all, as was the case with one high-powered executive who negotiates all the time for his job. This father, when asked about his negotiations with his children, responded: “I’m just not very successful when I negotiate with my kids. My default answer has become ‘Go ask your mother.’” It’s impossible to always do well, but the hope is that there is a better way to engage, and to use those 2,000 opportunities to negotiate in a way that feels more productive and satisfying to both sides.
THE LIMITS OF LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE
Unfortunately, we don’t always learn from our experiences very well. Imagine that you had a conversation with your child, and you said something like, “I know you keep getting upset because your friends all have phones and you don’t have one yet. We’re ready to buy you a phone as soon as you can show us that you can keep track of your homework for at least a month without being reminded.” Let’s say your child happily answered with, “Okay!” Now, we can call that a successful interaction, even a negotiation of sorts (as a proposal was made and accepted).
But do we understand why it was successful? Was it because you started by correctly identifying what your child was feeling? Was it because you laid out reasonable tasks to be accomplished before the goal was reached? Was it because you waited until bedtime to bring this up when everyone was calm and fed and happy? Or was it because anything that you said that suggested that a phone would be forthcoming was going to be a hit, and nothing else mattered? We don’t get to know which things were the actual drivers of the results.
It’s even harder when a situation goes badly. Was it just the wrong moment to try to talk about it? Was it the actual proposals made, or the tone of voice that one or both of you used? We similarly never get to know how things might have gone differently if we had said or done something else. We also tend to blame someone else when things go wrong; that’s human nature. This may make us feel better, but it doesn’t help us learn from one situation to the next. It doesn’t motivate us to think about how we might need to change our own behavior. We need to learn how to be thoughtful about the choices we are making in handling the struggles that parenting brings.
Parenting is one long process of being bombarded with warnings, advice, and best practices to make sure that you are raising healthy, capable, happy kids. Unfortunately, the advice that circles around us has a tendency to simultaneously recommend polar opposite approaches. For example, we are told:
•Kids need to have space to make mistakes on their own, to figure things out, and to learn to rely on their own sense of judgment. Yet, at the same time, kids need the guidance of parents, sometimes need to be told what to do, and need discipline to turn into respectful and civilized adults.
•They need to be encouraged to try their best, and not be overly praised for mediocre efforts, but they should simultaneously never be so pressured to improve or perform that they become resentful or too stressed out.
•They should be exposed to as many different things—music, art, various sports, languages—as early as possible, but they should also have plenty of time for “just being a kid” and playing without a class or formal activity.
•They should be fully literate with technology, and perhaps even master basic coding at a young age, but they should not spend too large a chunk of time in front of screens.
•Children of all ages need consistency in the rules and in the patterns of their lives, but we should remember to also be spontaneous and show that it’s not healthy to get dogmatic about rules every single minute of the day.
The basic tension here boils down to walking the fine line between structure and freedom. The paradox of parenting is that parents are supposed to be able to provide effective structure, opportunities, and discipline without hindering the child’s freedom to explore and discover both individual passions and an understanding of cause-and-effect in the world. These same tensions present themselves in the negotiations we have with our children. Should we just overrule them and abide by the “because I said so” logic? Or should we give them a chance to participate in crafting solutions that account for their wishes? In general, how much control should we be handing over, and when?
A parallel set of ideas has taken shape in the study of leadership. Through a concept aptly named paradoxical leadership, scholars have identified the tensions inherent in attempting to both satisfy employees and meet the needs of the organization simultaneously. Like parents, managers must figure out how to maintain rules and procedures while simultaneously allowing for flexibility and sometimes making exceptions. One research team identified the following core dimensions to this paradox:2
•Combining self-centeredness with other-centeredness: An effective leader is often self-confident and proud of the leadership position from which power has been bestowed. At the same time, leaders need to recognize the value of others and be willing to share leadership roles with those below them.
•Maintaining both distance and closeness: Leaders need to maintain their authority by reinforcing their status, rank, and power. Yet, at the same time, they need to create and nurture interpersonal bonds with their subordinates. Too much distance and people may respond with fear; too much closeness and it may become difficult for leaders to offer criticism, correct mistakes, and manage the conflicts that occur.
•Treating people uniformly, while allowing individualization: Within a group, it is important to maintain fair treatment, yet treating all people identically can be demotivating. Instead, leaders need to maintain a sense of fairness but still recognize each individual for specific traits and abilities. People need to feel that work is assigned equally but also based on specific expertise.
•Enforcing work requirements and decision control, while allowing flexibility: Some control must be exerted by a leader over both the behaviors and the ultimate goals and outcomes of subordinates. However, nobody thrives if they are told exactly what to do and how to do it all the time.
Sounds a lot like the “fine lines” of parenting. Kids need to know that their parents are in charge but also feel as if their values and input are respected. We know intuitively that kids need freedom and structure in appropriate amounts and in appropriate settings to both learn their place in the world and how to be independent in it. We know that siblings need to feel as if they are treated the same but also be recognized, respected, and loved for who they are as individuals.
As with so many things, the devil is in the details. Knowing exactly when to let them run free and when to provide the structure and rules is an unanswerable problem, and one with which nearly every parent struggles. The leadership scholars have recommended adopting a “both-and” perspective on the nature of our roles in which we need to do things that might sometimes feel inconsistent (for example, accepting that as a parent you probably need to be both strict and permissive, and not one or the other). These paradoxes mean that parents need a broad repertoire of skills (a fully stocked toolbox) to be effective in their day-to-day negotiations.
THE PROBLEM OF ANALOGICAL TRANSFER
It is surprisingly difficult to think the same way when we interact with our kids as when we interact with other people, even if the situations have definite parallels. This is called the problem of analogical transfer. We first need to see that there is an analogy to be drawn between two situations to be able to effectively recognize that we may already have solutions at the ready.
Parents having trouble with negotiations at home may be falling victim to the difficulty of analogical transfer, or the ability to take solutions from one setting and apply them to structurally similar, but seemingly very different, problems in another. For example, take the story of the successful executive who explained that, while he was routinely complimented on his negotiation skills within his organization, when he got home and was faced with an irrational, short-sighted child, he simply didn’t know what to do. When reminded that he often negotiated with irrational, short-sighted business clients, he was perplexed—what was the difference?
When we say “I don’t know what to do,” we can mean one of two different things. We can mean that we don’t have the skills to deal with this problem, or we can mean that we don’t understand which skills that we already possess will be useful here. These can feel the same in the moment, but they’re not. If you don’t have the skills, learning them is the right next step. But often, we fall into the second trap; we have the skills but somehow fail to access them or see them as relevant to the current situation. This is the problem of analogical transfer, which is the reason that learning new principles and skills, as well as reviewing familiar ones, serves us well when we’re in the heat of the moment with our kids.
The executive who didn’t know how to deal with his irrational child was having exactly this problem: it wasn’t that this father didn’t know how to negotiate with an irrational opponent, but that he didn’t think to call upon those skills when faced with an angry child. He had the problem of inert knowledge, meaning that he had the analytical skills and tactics needed to solve this problem, but he couldn’t access them at the right moment.4 Because he had never been coached or encouraged to consider how the negotiation strategies he used at work transferred to home, and because he didn’t recognize the similarities between the two problems, he failed to see how his own skills could be utilized. Though this is difficult, it can be done once you get into the habit of comparing situations and looking for similarities.5
Imagine you are negotiating with your teen about allowance. They want a 20% increase, and argue that even with this amount, they will still be getting less than their friends. You might just dive in and say either “yes” or “no,” and feel justified in either decision, since you have briefly analyzed the situation and made a decision about whether or not their logic is reasonable. Alternatively, you might stop to consider how you would respond to a subordinate at work who is requesting a raise that would be paid out of your budget. The surface level similarities should be obvious—both parties are asking you for more money, and in both cases, you have the power as the boss/parent. Beyond these surface-level features, there are additional parallels as well. In both cases, how you handle the negotiation and the resolution will have consequences lasting beyond the immediate outcome—precedents will be set, fairness issues need to be addressed, and the explanation may end up meaning nearly as much as the decision itself. It should not feel as much like unfamiliar territory as it probably does in the moment.
Why are we thrown off course like this? Repetition, carry-over, emotion, and multiple agendas can get in the way. The repetition (this is probably not the first time your teen has asked for money) may lead us to knee-jerk reactions instead of thoughtful ones. The issue of carry-over (if you give in on this, you might be expected to give in on the next thing too) can make us fearful of conceding any ground. The emotion is not the same as it is at work (your teen probably doesn’t ask with the same degree of deference and respect as your employee), which triggers an entirely different set of thoughts, emotions, and reactions in you. Finally, the multiple agendas (Will they be really angry with me if I don’t comply? Will I be spoiling the child if I give too much money without chores associated with it? Why do they need more money anyway?) can make us feel like we’re reading from different scripts when we’re acting as parent as opposed to acting as supervisor in a professional setting. It can feel like there is a right way to do things in each setting, and so we follow that path without considering whether it’s the best choice. Analogical transfer is a life skill. Learning to access the best practices used in one setting and apply them in another can unlock creativity, make you more effective, help you navigate your relationships, and help you succeed in negotiations in all settings.
FIVE BIG IDEAS ABOUT LEARNING NEGOTIATION SKILLS
•We negotiate every day, sometimes without realizing it. Recognizing when negotiations are taking place can help you identify more options for proceeding with them.
•We’re not always going to do what we mean to do. Nobody negotiates right all of the time, especially with kids. Parenting is hard, and comes with competing goals of both managing the here and now and laying the right course for the future. Perfection is not the goal, learning is.
•Kids learn by observing you. Use this as an opportunity to help them learn how to resolve differences of opinion and other conflicts.
•The best negotiators know that practice with reflection is required to be at the top of their game. Take a moment after every negotiation to assess which tools and strategies worked and which were fumbles. Think about a successful negotiation you had with your child. Specifically, can you identify what might have prompted this success? Now think about an unsuccessful negotiation. What went wrong? Though it’s tempting to blame the situation or other people for our failures, true learning only happens when we look inward and think through the question of what we ourselves might have done differently to have a better outcome.
•It’s difficult to transfer skills and solutions from one setting to a different one. Imagine your child was your colleague or another adult instead. How might you act and react differently? Is there anything you can borrow from those other contexts to help in this one? These kinds of thoughts can allow you to access the knowledge and skills you already have.
NOTES
1. Francis, G. (2018, July 26). Parents have more than 2,000 rows with their kids every year—and they only “win” half. The Mirror. https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/parents-more-2000-rows-kids-12983598.
2. Zhang, Y., Waldman, D., Han, Y.–L., & Li, X.–B. (2015). Paradoxical leader behaviors in people management: Antecedents and consequences. Academy of Management Journal, 58(2), 538–566. doi: 10.5465/amj.2012.0995.
3. Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1980). Analogical problem solving. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 306–355; Duncker, K. (1945). On problem-solving. Psychological Monographs, 58(5), 270.
4. Gillespie, J. J., Thompson, L. L., Loewenstein, J., & Gentner, D. (1999). Lessons from analogical reasoning in the teaching of negotiation. Negotiation Journal, 15(4), 363–371.
5. Gentner, D., & Hoyos, C. (2017). Analogy and abstraction. Topics in Cognitive Science, 9, 672–693. doi: 10.1111/tops.12278; Loewenstein, J., Thompson, L., & Gentner, D. (1999). Analogical encoding facilitates transfer in negotiation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6(4), 586–597; Thompson, L., Gentner, D., & Loewenstein, J. (2000). Avoiding missed opportunities in managerial life: Analogical training more powerful than individual case training. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 82(1), 60–75. doi: 10.1006/obhd.2000.2887.