Before I was a Mom, I hardly knew anybody with kids. I had close family members that have kids, but they lived in another country, so I had contact with children only in small doses.
It seems that since I became a Mom, there are more and more Moms and children in my universe.
More often than not, I try (quite hard, being that I am a very opinionated person) not to give my opinions unless I’m asked. And one of the things I observe time and time again, is that Moms (and some Dads too) are unable to say No to their kids.
Ok, well, they say No. Once. And a portion of them say it twice. But come the third attempt from their child, and they bulk. So I’ll voice my opinions here 😉
I love Supernanny’s stance on this topic. No means No. It doesn’t mean maybe, it doesn’t mean later. It means NO.
Now, the trick is to actually give it some thought – to whatever they are asking of you – before you respond. You can’t say No to everything. It would hardly be fair on them. So you have to choose your battles.
What I tend to do is that if there are things that are absolutely absurd, I just say an outright no. If there are things that are “adult-crazy” but make perfectly good sense in your child’s mind, then I say “I’ll think about it” (which you might say is a cop out). If they insist “but I have to know now!!!!”, then I say “ok, if you have to know now, then the answer is no”.
Most often than not, they don’t ask again. If they do it’s because it was really important for them. And at that time, you can then decide whether it’s worth indulging them or not.
But the most typical scenario is when they ask you something and you say No and then they start with their incessant badgering, which seems to only ever stop when they get a Yes.
If you think about it, we all do it. We do it with our friends (“oh please please please come out for coffee tonight”), with our spouses (“hunny, please please please can you make lunch today”) and with our own parents too (“Mommy, please please please come babysit this Saturday”).
We all do it because it generally works. And the problem is that we always have an audience, all too keen to learn by our examples.
With my eldest two (little Miss A still too little to understand No. She literally just laughs in my face when I say it) after I decide to say No, then that’s it. They badger, I say No again. They badger some more, I say No again. When I’m fed up of all the badgering (and they’re tired of it too), I say “What does No mean?”. If they try to be clever and retort “No means Yes”, I say something like “Ok, do you want to have Brussels sprouts with dinner tonight?” … You can imagine where this is going. They say “no” and I say “oh, so that means yes, right?”, so they say “no”.
“Ok, great, so what does No mean?” I repeat. “It means No, Mommy”.
Game over.