No, No, a Thousand Times, No
by Chris Byrne

From the time they’re born today’s kids are consumers. Up until about age two, they influence the vast majority of purchases made in your home. (Like you bought that mini-van because it was "so cool." Not so, right?) Then they start asking for stuff…

And asking and asking and asking. No adult could invent a marketing ploy as effective as the non-stop nag. In fact, I bet if you could channel the energy that kids invest in trying to get you to open your wallet, we could light L.A. for a year. The little ones are masters of what we call the "sandpaper effect." It wears you down, and I
mean major emotional erosion here. In ten seconds you go from a sweet little, "Mommy can we…" to industrial belt sander at full bore grinding away at your parental resolve. It’s an astonishing phenomenon. Really, I think
the Discovery Channel should do a documentary on it it.

Madison Avenue types even have a jargon-y name for this behavior and its effect: "pester power." They sit in meetings and look for ways to encourage that–like kids need a lot of coaching. I think it’s instinctive; kids just know the tone of voice and frequency that, when repeated over and over and over, will drive you right to the brink…and beyond. It occurs to me that all the time the FBI spends training hostage negotiators is wasted. Just pipe in the whining from any backseat, and the bad guys will give up in ten minutes. Less if you’ve got more
than one kid going at it.

You get the point. And, probably more often than not, you give in. Hey, if the nagging didn’t work, kids would
quit it like that. In fact, scientists could probably demonstrate that there is no living organism as adaptive as the five-year-old with his or her mind set on having some toy or product…and that includes the cockroach. (And, no, I’m not suggesting kids are equivalent to cockroaches, so please don’t write angry letters.) They’ll try anything till it works, and sometimes the change-ups leave your head spinning.

But there will be times when your no means no. For example, if your child wants something that’s inconsistent with your values, such as a toy you believe to be violent or just not good, you’ll want to make clear that there is no tactic that’s going to work. Rather than getting into an argument with your five-year-old, which you can’t win by the way, this is a chance to create a stronger sense of family identity and educate your child about your values. I’ve seen this work with everything from dolls to video games to dressing up in clothes a parent feels are inappropriate. The process is not to forbid, but to share with the child what you believe in a way that he or she can understand. It might take work, but it’s worth it. At the end of the day, you contribute to building a sense of family identity that’s based in your values and rather than making the desired object "forbidden fruit," you help provide a loving context in which to accept the no.

It won’t work every time. One mother had spent years explaining to her daughter that their family didn’t buy Barbie because her body wasn’t realistic. Then, when the Barbie redesign happened to make the doll more realistically proportional, her daughter caught that on the news, marched into the kitchen and said, "So now we can have Barbie." Actually, in that case, everyone won. Even Mattel.

Oh, and you’ll still sometimes be the awful slime-dripping ogre who denies your child the one thing that stands between his or her and happiness, at least for the next ten minutes. But, hey, it comes with the territory.