In the marketing business, there’s a valuable intangible called “pester power,” in which the petitioning abilities of children are harnessed to push more product. Pester power explains why, for instance, lurid cereals are stocked at a child’s eye level. Supermarkets and cereal makers would not do this if it didn’t work. “Awww … pleeeeeeaase? We looooooove Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs! Just one box? Please? We’ll eat extra salad at dinner! Pleeeeeeaase?”
Whether or not the harried parent gives in and drops a box of the ghastly stuff into her cart depends on how firm a line she’s currently maintaining against wheedling, beseeching, and pleading. After all, children would not do this if it didn’t work.
Unfortunately, the way a parent typically learns that she’s let the line go dangerously blurry is the moment when she loses patience and barks at her persecutors.
Only then — too late! — does she realize that she’s been giving in almost without realizing it. It’s fatally easy to do so, because children are tireless in probing for weak spots and inconsistencies in the structure of home life.
Can I push back my bedtime, just a little? Do I have to eat all my peas, every single one? Can some separate and wholly reasonable arrangement be reached in which I can have plain spaghetti tonight, rather than with that gross sauce?
For a parent to relent on any one of these requests takes but a breath, yet leaves her vulnerable to fresh lobbying not just because she’s weakened, but also because the supplicants have gained strength in zero-sum fashion.
And oh, but their methods can be subtle.
“I just want to give you a hug and a kiss,” a friend’s toddler began saying a few weeks ago from her darkened bedroom, when she heard her mother pass by the door.
She’d have to have an ironclad heart to resist that, right? The sweet thing is only 3. It took several nights of post-bedtime hugs and kisses, each session a little longer than the one before, for the mother to realize that she was being played.
Firmly, she told the child that all hugs and kisses would now take place before the light went out. And that was that, until a few days later the tiny voice was heard calling piteously: “I just have to tell you one thing! It’s important!”
Important? Well, of course! My friend went into the nursery. “I have to tell you … it’s very important. It’s … ummmm… .” said the child.
The tactic had failed, and the child knew it. So a few nights later she tried a new approach.
“I had a bad dream!” she cried out, shortly after her parents had turned off the light.
Concerned (and gullible), the girl’s mother returned and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“But you haven’t been to sleep yet. It couldn’t have been a dream. Did something scare you?”
“Yes,” said the child.
“What, honey?”
“It was … .”
“It’s OK. What scared you?”
“Ummmm …..”
Curses! She’d been foiled again.
