Question: Since when do we defer so much to kids?

The other day there was a big boy in the sand area at the park where numerous children (including mine) were playing, and he was whipping sand around from one of our sand toys, so I said, “Can you stop doing that?” and he just looked at me blankly and with mild irritation. So without thinking, I said, “Please, can you stop?” Blank look. Then by way of explanation, I said, “There are a lot of little kids around here and we don’t want them getting sand in their eyes.” This was true. It seemed finally good enough for him. So he stopped.

Apparently a grown up politely asking a child to change his behavior is unusual. Or at least this child seemed to think so. There was no parent or adult authority figure that I could affiliate with the kid, who couldn’t have been more than 10 or so. But he was so unmoved by my friendly attempt at authority.

After it happened I felt really lame; why was I begging/asking a kid, becoming a supplicant, when he was doing something obnoxious and WITH OUR OWN SAND TOYS, no less? I was irritated. And then I let it slide.

But it came back to me, because I notice how we often talk to our children: Can you please do this? Would you like to take a bath? And it reminded me of when I was getting my teaching credential and I had a brilliant teacher named Bethany who warned us about using overly polite language when working with teenagers. She said that if you suggested that the students sit down, it wasn’t enough. If you said, “Would you like to do some work now?” it was would be perfectly reasonable and predictable for the teenager to say “no.”

Because you gave them a choice.

And if you give teenagers a choice, they’ll choose the option that’s most convenient to them, not you.

But it isn’t only true for teenagers. It’s true for kids of all ages.

We give our kids too many choices.

Do you want peanut butter or almond butter? Cream cheese or American cheese? Blue’s Clues or Barney? This shirt or that one?

It’s the tyranny of choice.

And I’m as guilty as the next person to couch my commands in a pleading either/or form.

But at a certain point, we need to be grown-ups and say, Here is your choice: sometimes there isn’t one.