Children Don’t Need Reasons
Question: I am in the midst of reading your latest book, “A Family of Value,” which is the first of yours I’ve ever read, and I’m appalled at your sanction of “Because I said so.” That seems quite backward to me. I think it’s obvious that children need to know why their parents make the decisions they make.
Answer: Pardon my backwardness, but we disagree. Children do not need to know the reasons behind their parents’ decisions. A state of need is not selective. If, for example, you are starving, you will not turn up your nose at liver, no matter how distasteful it may be to you under normal circumstances.
Children, however, are quite selective concerning their requests-demands to know the reasons behind parental decisions. They only ask-demand reasons for decisions they don’t like. If a parent tells a 10-year-old that yes, he may go to the shopping mall at night with a group of older boys of dubious reputation and “hang out” until it closes, the child will not demand to know the reason behind the decision.
Therefore, I conclude children do not need reasons; they want them. They want, I submit, because they have learned that if they can get their parents to give reasons, they can probably get their parents into arguments that they might just win.
“Because I said so” is also, more often than not, the most honest reason a parent can give for any given decision. Let’s face it, folks, most (I’d estimate 95 percent) of the decisions parents make are founded primarily on personal preference. They are arbitrary and somewhat capricious (based as they are on personal, as opposed to universal, values) and almost always designed to keep parental anxiety at a minimum.
A certain parent refuses his teen permission to stay out later than midnight not because something bad is certain to happen if he doesn’t, but because the parent feels anxious when the child is out past midnight. Therefore, midnight it is, because the parent says so.
Having said all that, I do not recommend (and I make this clear in “A Family of Value,”) that parents actually say “because I said so” more than occasionally. Go ahead and give reasons! But keep in mind two things:
1. There are fewer than 10 reasons. The most oft-used five are: The child might get hurt, you don’t like the peers in question, the child is not old enough, there is not enough time, and the cost of the activity-thing cannot be justified.
By the time a child is of school age, he or she has learned which reasons applies to what type of situation. To verify this, the next time your child demands a reason from you, say, “Oh, I’ll just bet you already know what my reason is.” There is an almost 100 percent likelihood the child will give the correct reason, albeit he will also tell you he thinks it stinks.
2. Fact: If a child does not like a decision a parent has made, she is not going to like any reason the parent gives to support the decision. The teen in the previous example, upon hearing that he cannot stay out past midnight because the parent believes teens are more likely to get into trouble after that hour, is not going to say, “You know, Mom and Dad, now that you point that out, I can’t help but agree and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your concern.” Nope. The teen is going to think the reason stinks as much as the decision.
So, I tell parents, go ahead and give a 10-words-or-less reason for any decision you make. When the child’s objections escalate, as is inevitable, simply say, “Oh, if I was your age, I wouldn’t agree with that decision or that reason either. The fact is you don’t have to agree, but you do have to accept. And you must accept for no other reason than because I say so.”
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