I’m not sure your candy example is a mistake. In retrospect, would you prefer to have said “you have to wait until we’re out of the car”, with no choice, or “if you eat it now, you have to clean up any mess, and I’ll keep a dollar as deposit.” I suspect the latter is your preference in the first place.
In cases where there’s no good choice to be made (taking a bath after company arrives), you can also just acknowledge the mistake—“I didn’t realize when I asked that it’s not actually a choice. You have to do X.”
I think telling them to wait would still be my preference in retrospect, though it’s close. It really does take a lot more time, and that can cause downstream problems (ex: we’re heading home before bed, timing is tight, doing this means later bedtime and worse sleep for them).
Makes sense. So how do you feel about acknowledging to the kid that you’re imperfect and sometimes have to retract a choice when you learn that it’s infeasible, VS committing to the choice but salvaging the results with extra restrictions?
It seems that either one is somewhat misleading to the child (and they’ll figure it out anyway) - either you’re intentionally giving the illusion of choice as an attempt to trick them into buying in to the result, or you’re not a perfect supervisor, and can’t be trusted to know everything all the time.
Depending on where you come from and the age of the kid, properly explaining that you are fallible too and resolve their dissatisfaction can take much more time, i.e., more downstream stress than the OP approach. Good think to have in your toolbox.
I’m not sure your candy example is a mistake. In retrospect, would you prefer to have said “you have to wait until we’re out of the car”, with no choice, or “if you eat it now, you have to clean up any mess, and I’ll keep a dollar as deposit.” I suspect the latter is your preference in the first place.
In cases where there’s no good choice to be made (taking a bath after company arrives), you can also just acknowledge the mistake—“I didn’t realize when I asked that it’s not actually a choice. You have to do X.”
I think telling them to wait would still be my preference in retrospect, though it’s close. It really does take a lot more time, and that can cause downstream problems (ex: we’re heading home before bed, timing is tight, doing this means later bedtime and worse sleep for them).
Makes sense. So how do you feel about acknowledging to the kid that you’re imperfect and sometimes have to retract a choice when you learn that it’s infeasible, VS committing to the choice but salvaging the results with extra restrictions?
It seems that either one is somewhat misleading to the child (and they’ll figure it out anyway) - either you’re intentionally giving the illusion of choice as an attempt to trick them into buying in to the result, or you’re not a perfect supervisor, and can’t be trusted to know everything all the time.
Depending on where you come from and the age of the kid, properly explaining that you are fallible too and resolve their dissatisfaction can take much more time, i.e., more downstream stress than the OP approach. Good think to have in your toolbox.