Stop Saying “Okay?” After Each Instruction You Give to the Child
Have you ever eavesdropped on other parents on the playground? Don’t they sometimes sound, uh, pointless ? “Sophie, we don’t throw sand at our friends, okay?” Or, “Declan, time to go, okay?” Or, “Madge, leave that doggie poop alone, okay? The turd is nasty, okay ?
The point is, this is not normal for Madge. She wants to ride in dog feces more than anything she has ever wanted in her two years on earth. And Declan would rather spend the night alone in the weather-exposed playground, digging a warm hole under the swing, than go home and get into your stupid bathtub.
Sophie just really wants to blind her playmate.
What does the suffix “good?” some kind of absurdity. And yet we all do it, right? Sometimes I listen to me say to my four-year-old, “We’re going to get off the beach, okay?” which obviously leaves the door open for him to say no, that’s not okay.
I came across this post this morning and it hit a nerve:
For some parents – and I include myself in this group – we do not want to be tough supporters of authoritarianism, so we tend to be too wrong in our search for consensus. But parenting is not a Quaker gathering (if it were, it would be much quieter!). We want to guide children and set limits, not ask them to agree with us every step of the way.
This does not mean that children cannot have input and some control, as Hannah Gooding points out above. When I can think ahead, I’ll tell my son something like, “We’re leaving the beach in five minutes,” and when he (inevitably) yells “ Nooo,” I say, “When we get home, we can take a bath first, or first small TV – what would you like? “If I’m lucky, it will distract him enough from the pain of leaving the beach. Otherwise, he’s screaming bloody murder and I have to drag him to my car.
But I’m going to take “good” out of my parenting vocabulary because I think it gives kids the illusion of information they don’t really have, which is kind of an unpleasant thing to do. Let them contribute when you really mean it. Good?