An Hour of "Yes."

My 3.5 year old son is going through a defiant streak this week (oh God, please let it just be for this week!) where he is just out of sorts and unhappy with the world.  I can sympathize.  It’s  been the kind of week when I just want to howl at the world until it bends to my will, or at least allows me to take a nap.  

Tonight, while his father made dinner, I decided that he and I would go for a walk to try to, as a friend’s mother puts it, “Blow the stink off of him.”  As we left the house and walked down the drive, he pointed to the right and said “Let’s go this way?”  Sure, why not?  So I agreed.  A block later, we came to the first intersection and he pointed straight ahead. “Let's go this way?”  Again, I nodded.  Yes, if we could walk on the side of the road.  He happily complied.

Within a few yards, we came to a point where we needed to either turn around,  take a path through the back side of a parking lot, or head toward the main road.  The sidewalk for the main road picks up here, so when my son pointed toward the highway and said “Can we keep going?”  I agreed, as long as we walked on the sidewalk.  He nodded agreeably and veered to the walk.

Ten minutes of not hearing the word “No,” and some much needed fresh air, had magically transformed him back into his sunny, agreeable self.  I decided that for the remainder of the hour, so long as it was reasonable, I wouldn’t say “No.”  We walked out to the highway and I let him pick which direction we turned.  After giving it some serious consideration, he turned thoughtfully to the right and pointed.  We headed north up the sidewalk, passing an auto repair shop with a display of tires outside.  He reached out his hand, clearly thought about this action, and looked back at me expectantly.  

 “I want to touch the tires,” he explained.

“Okay,” I agreed.  He ran his hand over the tread of one and then slapped his hand against it.

“It’s hard!” he exclaimed.  I concurred.  They need to be hard, they hold up the whole car on the road!

“We don’t throw wheels in the house.”

“We don’t throw anything in the house,” I amended “except the occasional pillow.”  He giggled.  We walked a little further on and came to a sign pole that he reached out and smacked his hand against. 

“I don’t touch the sign,” he said, clearly expecting a reprimand.

“You can touch that one.  It’s pretty tough.”  He nodded, considering.  We walked along, chatting about the cars going by, and in another block, he asked to walk in the grass, pointing to the space between a bank and the sidewalk.  I agreed, and we wandered through the grassy space, cutting across the corner to the next street.  As we passed the bank, he pointed to the door and announced “I want to go in the door.”  Hmmm.  By now I was committed to not saying “no” if I didn’t have to, but it was after 6:00, dinner was about ready at home, and we were clearly not going into the bank.  I considered for a moment.

“Honey, the bank is closed.  They locked the doors for the night.” I explained.  He thought this over for a moment, and then nodded as we continued on our way.  As we turned the corner toward home, he bent to pick up a pine cone.  My first instinct was to scold him to put it down, but I waited a heartbeat or two to think it over.  He was going to have to wash his hands before dinner anyway; what could the pinecone hurt?  I ignored it.  A few feet later, he bent to inspect a much more bedraggled specimen.  As he bent to pick it up, I opened my mouth to say “No!” but what came out was “Honey, that one’s really muddy and dirty.”  He poked it with his finger and wrinkled his nose.

“Ick!” he exclaimed, giggling, and walked away from the muddy cone.

“I want some milk!” He announced a few seconds later.  I nodded.

“Ok, but we need to go home for that.”  I agreed.

“Okay.  Let’s go home.”  And off we set.   

As we approached our own drive, he insisted we turn another direction.  Instead of saying no, dinner was about ready, I reminded him that he had asked for milk. He immediately struck out toward the front door.  After I shepherded him into the bathroom to wash his hands and back to the table, he turned to me and asked hopefully,

“Can we go for a walk again?”   I assured him that tomorrow, we would do just that.

Not saying “no” for that hour taught me a lesson.  It’s unrealistic, and unwise, to never say “No” to a child, and if he had asked for something unreasonable or unsafe, the answer would indeed have been a firm “No!”  As we left the house, I had reminded him that he needed to hold my hand the whole time.  He never once objected, or I would have had to say no.  That’s my job—to keep him safe and teach him to follow the rules.

But sometimes I say no, as all parents do, because it’s the easy answer.  Because it’s what we think we should say.  When we left the driveway, I had intended to turn left, and if I had been distracted or annoyed, I might have said “no” when he asked to go to the right.  When he asked to walk in the grass or touch the tires, I might have said “no” out of habit because these were not our yard or his things, but there was no harm in saying “yes.”  Those tires were destined to far tougher treatment than the pat of a 3 year old boy.  That grass had probably never been trod on by more than a handful of humans before.  Deciding I wasn’t going to say “no” prompted me to consider these things before giving him an answer.  It forced me to think of a different response to the bank door; one that allowed him to puzzle over the locked door and come to the “no” of it on his own—a critical thinking lesson on an evening walk around the neighborhood.

No one likes to feel as though their life is beyond their control, but when you’re three, the whole universe is often beyond your control.  Most of that is by necessity, but it doesn’t always have to be.  I could be more thoughtful in my answers and give him the chance to come to the “no” on his own, by his choice, some of the time.  If I model thinking over my responses before I give them, he might just learn to do the same.

The Hidden Dangers of "Yes"

For the sixth straight year, Penn State students have persisted in participating in what they call “State Patty’s Day,” an event organized on social media outlets, the sole purpose of which is to provide an excuse for people to wander aimlessly around town for 36 hours straight in a drunken stupor so profound that they appear too brainless and purposeless to even qualify as extras on The Walking Dead.  No, I take that back.  It does appear to have one other purpose: to ensure that photographs of people wandering the streets half-dressed and with fewer functioning brain cells than a pureed carrot can survive in perpetuity on the internet for not only future employers, but future grandchildren, to find.

No, I’m not a fan of this event.  And no, it’s not a “holiday.” Stop calling it that.

Funny thing is, I don’t think many of my students are fans anymore, either.  Last year in a very long, very candid conversation with my graduating seniors, I heard many of them say over and over that the majority of the people who were drunk all day, wandering out into traffic, driving the wrong way on one way streets, and generally causing mayhem, were not PSU students but people from out of town.  The arrest records and emergency response reports bear this out.  My response to them was that not one hotel was booked up that weekend (yes, I really did check), so these people who were coming from out of town were staying somewhere.  That “somewhere” was with people who go to school here.  Over and over again people told me stories of coming home to find 6-7 guests in their apartments, some people they didn’t know.  I suggested that they were the ones with the keys; they could always say no.  My students looked at me in horror.  “Well, that would be kinda rude, wouldn’t it?” one normally very bright young woman asked me.  Rude?  Someone you don’t know is crashing in your apartment without your consent, after coming here uninvited and spending the whole weekend drunk and disorderly?  I think “No, you can’t sleep in the apartment I pay rent for” is the only reasonable, sane response.

This year, in the midst of my yearly pathetic attempt to convince them why participating in this insanity is a bad idea (particularly this year), I heard more than one student complain that out of town guests had invited themselves for the weekend.  My students felt compelled not only to allow these people in their apartments, but to make accommodations for them (being home at a certain time to let them in, making bedding available, and even granting specific food requests).  The comments I heard were all variations on the same theme: “This is just a hassle. I wish it would go away.”  I was dumbfounded.  I suggested to one young woman that she could just tell these people that it’s a VERY bad time for this and they should not expect to come and stay with her.  Then she was dumbfounded.  “I don’t want to be rude and say no.”

That’s when it struck me.  My students were very uncomfortable saying know, even to unreasonable requests from acquaintances, because they didn’t know how to say no.  They had no model for it because they had heard it so seldom themselves.

No one likes to say no.  It’s human nature to want to please other people and accommodate requests, but those of us who did not grow up in the “everyone plays, everyone wins” era at least have some model for saying and hearing no.  We’ve been told no by parents, teachers, coaches, and directors and survived it.  We’ve learned to understand that “no” isn’t fatal and doesn’t have to be mean.  By always telling our kids “yes,” we’ve robbed them of that model.  By always giving them what they want, whether it’s the lead in the play, a place on the team, or a car, we’ve taught them not only that hearing “no” is bad, but that saying “no” is worse.  If no one has ever told them no, it must be really, really terrible.  If their parents and teachers avoided it, they probably should, too.

I’m not suggesting that being able to say no to their friends would prevent any of the bad behavior that goes on here during this annual event, but it might allow them to let it die the natural death it should have fallen to years ago. Then again, if they had heard "no" more often earlier in life, the whole spectacle of walking around drunk, throwing trash and urinating in people's yards, and stumbling out into traffic, and then demanding shelter from people you hardly know might have struck them from the start as the bad idea it truly is.