Negotiating with kids can sometimes feel like stepping into quicksand. It can happen immediately and with little warning, and can be instantly overwhelming. It’s easy to lose your bearings and find yourself acting in ways you didn’t expect and don’t necessarily like, especially because everything keeps changing. While governments can decide on a “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” stance, parents who try the home version of “we don’t negotiate with toddlers or teenagers” will find that it’s not very practical.
We spend an awful lot of time negotiating with our kids—over everyday requests, rules and policies, and big decisions. This book offers a chance to look more closely at what you already do well (and why) and what you can do better. It builds on both the science of negotiations and on the skills you already use in other areas of your life, so that you can navigate these interactions in a way you’re proud of. You want to move out of the quicksand and back to solid ground.
Though it would be reassuring to have a specific list of things to do and say for each situation, that’s not realistic. No book, article, lecture, or specialist can provide an exact “do this!” when you face tough moments with any guarantee of it working. Parents and kids interact in truly unique ways, and nobody knows your kids better than you do. You’ve become the parent you are because of the children you are raising. What works in your family won’t necessarily work in ours and vice versa.
However, running right alongside the unique aspects of your life at home are the commonalities that you share with so many other parents. From combing through the research on parenting and negotiations, and from speaking to hundreds of parents while writing this book, we recognize that there are patterns to negotiations with kids that we can all learn from. As parents, professors, and researchers ourselves, it’s our job to cull these commonalities and distill the lessons in them. There are tools to be borrowed—tools about how to plan, how to recognize specific tactics, how to communicate and work in partnerships with other family members, and how to handle conflict. Whether you choose the proverbial hammer, wrench, level, or bandage in any particular moment, though, is going to be up to you.
WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW AND WHAT’S NEW
Remember the first time you held your newborn, that delicate bundle of adorable tiny fingers and baby yawns and loving gazes? Do you also remember the red-faced screams, sleepless nights, and the never-ending messes? You may have felt a mixture of love and panic. You may have looked for the manual that clearly should have come with them, telling you how to raise this person. You may have even felt like an imposter at the beginning, as so many people do. You parent every day, and you gain skills in handling one set of things just as an entirely new set of things comes barreling toward you. This book aims to both explore the things you already know and to introduce new ideas.
The new ideas come from the science on leadership, psychology, education, negotiations, communication, and parenting. But even within these, some ideas may feel like commonsense and things that you already know. So, why spend time reading about these ideas? For one thing, even if we have a sense of the right path forward, understanding more about why and how certain tactics and techniques work can allow us to make better choices about which tools to use when. For another, when it comes to important ideas and lessons in life, it turns out we can all always use reminders. We do forget a lot of what we learn. And finally, without repeated exposure, the ideas and lessons that we might be able to discuss clearly when we’re out of the situation, while feeling calm and focused on the direction we’d like to take, may be nowhere near the surface when we need them. (One parent described her shock when she actually tried the long-heard advice to “stop and count to 10” when losing her temper, and found it helpful. It had taken many times of hearing the idea to finally remember to do it in the heat of the moment.) Despite our best intentions, our behaviors often slide away from the way we mean for things to go. This is especially true of the interactions that happen after you hit the “That’s it! I’ve had it!” wall. It can take a lot of effort to get past those moments.
Even experts benefit from reminders and review of basic concepts. By way of example, a professional hostage negotiator once enrolled in a five-day negotiations training session, which was more typically attended by novice negotiators. When asked why he was there, he shared that he attended a similar training session every year. He said that it helped him do his job better to have regular reminders of what makes for an effective negotiation. It needs to be a habit, he explained. Otherwise, whatever you’ve learned will probably fly out the window when it really counts. Something that has been repeated often enough that it becomes the default for you to execute only comes with enough exposure.
This book is divided into three sections, which together provide the essential steps for reaching an agreement with your kids. Step One is called “Cracking the Negotiations Code,” in which the lessons learned from the realm of professional negotiations are applied to the particular interactions between parents and children. In the first chapter, we provide an introduction to the topic and a sense of scope about negotiations with kids, as over the course of the thirteen years between the ages of five and eighteen, parents spend approximately 468 full eight-hour days negotiating with them. That’s a lot of time! We also explain why it’s so hard to transfer the skills you may use repeatedly and successfully in other settings to life at home. Chapter 2 dives into the idea of preparing effectively for negotiations, and lays out the three questions that will most help you feel confident and be competent in the negotiation itself. Chapter 3 identifies the main strategic approaches available when negotiating with your children—using your power, creating and relying on rules and precedent, or seeking insight into the bigger issues important to you both.
Step Two is called “Becoming a Master of the Moment” and analyzes particularly tricky events and interactions that can derail your best intentions. In this section, Chapter 4 lays out the most common tactics that kids use to try to get what they want so you can better see these coming and know what to do when they arrive. Chapter 5 explains some of the widespread predictable pitfalls that influence you without awareness and can disrupt your decisions. Chapter 6 then turns to the different roles you may be called on to play within family negotiations: teammate, coach, and judge. Finally, Chapter 7 explores the ever-increasing occurrence of communicating and negotiating with kids via text instead of in person.
Step Three is called “Bringing the Best of Yourself” and is focused on the elements that you, as an individual, bring to the proverbial table. Chapter 8 discusses the issue of emotions and how to manage the strong feelings that can cloud productive conversations. Chapter 9 talks about your personal style for handling conflict and communicating, and how choosing your language carefully can help you put your best foot forward. Then, Chapter 10 highlights the main points of each chapter and shares the experiences of parents who tried out some of the ideas in their families. Finally, the appendix offers a set of rules to help your kids learn to think like master negotiators themselves, and better handle the situations they encounter in their own lives.
Throughout the book, we include anecdotes from parents in the “Stories from Home” to illustrate actual examples of these ideas unfolding in real family interactions. A few of these are stories from our own homes, but the majority come from parents we interviewed, surveyed, and informally chatted with. We’ve learned so much from talking to others, as you no doubt learn from other parents in your life. These stories give you a chance to get a glimpse of others who are experiencing the same situations that you yourself may be facing, and to see how other people act and react. Some scenarios might be familiar, and others might unfold differently than they do in your home. Kids occasionally push us to the point where we no longer feel sure of what to do next, which is humbling. It’s reassuring to know that when we hit that point, other parents have been there too. Note that in the anecdotes, we’ve kept the gendered pronouns that parents themselves used. In the text itself, however, we’ve opted for the gender-neutral use of “they/their/them” in our writing so that our examples and stories don’t slant toward a particular group.
New challenges will always arise in the day-to-day lives of parents. This book was written to give you a chance to step back, look at the patterns, and understand the tools available for successfully navigating your negotiations with those fascinating and frustrating miracles we call our kids. Happy negotiating!