I was standing in a department store checkout queue recently, when my 7-year-old daughter started hounding me to buy whatever it was they put in the checkout queue to seduce kids into pester power territory.
“No” I say, simply.
She asks for the next “thing”.
“No” I repeat. “We’re not buying anything from these stands today.”
The woman in front of me, who had been listening to our conversation, turns around and asks with a resigned smile, “How do you do that?”.
I looked at her and said, “I just say ‘No”.
[OK, I wanted to say, “Well, DUH”, but we were in a public place and I didn’t want to start a fight].
The interaction got me thinking about the cult of giving our kids everything they want all the time and the reluctance of parents to say “No”.
Affluenza: it’s a real thing. The Macquarie Dictionary defines it as “the dissatisfaction… Read the rest