There is a parenting trend of never saying no. Underneath it is a misunderstanding about authenticity: if we say no, we are not letting the child be their authentic self.
What Is an Authentic Self?
Looked at closely, the idea makes little sense. What is an authentic self? The phrase does not tell us which behaviors deserve encouragement, which differences deserve acceptance, or which actions need a boundary. It is a parenting intervention built on a pseudo-term.
I like to make a joke of it. Which authentic self? My cortex self, my limbic self, or my brainstem? Neurologically that is a radical oversimplification, but in terms of base impulses we are essentially three things. It is similar to Freud, though a lot different, actually.
Let’s say somebody walks up and takes a can of bubbly water out of my hand. My brainstem punches him in the face. My emotional self gets really angry, and maybe starts crying. My cognitive self starts to understand the long-term picture and develops a strategy for some degree of justice, like getting the can back with the least amount of social consequence.
Which one is authentic? It’s a trick question. It is an interplay of all of them, or we could argue that all of them are authentic.
Why the Idea Is Compelling
It does hold something compelling. To use the cliché generational lens, think of children being seen and not heard. Taken further, the child is the property of the adult. They are to acclimate completely to the cultural norms and be a helpful utility to the parent, the society, or the congregation.
The far other end of the pole says any conformity is an oppression of authenticity, creating unnecessary anxieties and harmful emotions in children. So we should let them do whatever they want.
Both poles, as with most things in life, end up being rather ridiculous.
Honoring Uniqueness Within a Social Ethic
The center point is honoring the uniqueness of the child: their attributes, who they are, their trait-dependent skills and their nurtured skills. That has to go in conjunction with a social ethic, a culture of living among other people.
No, we are not running around the restaurant. That makes the server’s job more difficult.
That no grows consideration, and an appreciation of boundaries.
What Never Saying No Teaches
The extreme needs saying, because some parents literally never tell their child no. We are teaching entitlement and a life without boundaries.
The Most Extreme Case
The most extreme example is a child who has never been told no growing up into an adult, and then finding themselves in a sexual situation where they need to respect the boundaries of another person in a very significant and important way. It is ideal that by then, that human has had multiple experiences of responding to other people’s boundaries. Boundaries are often expressed with the word no, and incidentally, with the word yes.
The Everyday Instances
On the other end of the spectrum are all the little instances of entitlement. When we don’t tell a child no, how well are they going to deal with a situation with a friend that involves sharing, or a differing opinion about what the plan should be?
The Classroom
This shows up very much in the school system, where our teachers are already often dramatically outnumbered. Short of turning class sizes from upwards of 1 to 30 into something like 1 to 10, the natural consequence is that we need a significant amount of adherence to structure. Children need to be prepared to be conscientious and considerate of the boundaries of the classroom, so that the teacher can do their best to meet the needs of 30 unique individuals.
The Culture
Go one frame up, and boundaries are what produce a functional culture. Being conscious and considerate of the needs and boundaries of other people is how culture works. If somebody wanted to dump all their trash into the river where the whole village fishes and gets its drinking water, it doesn’t work if that person can’t be told no.
No is how we learn to respect the rights and the importance of other people.
The Inverse: Saying No All the Time
Sometimes we, or other people, are so intolerant of difference that no becomes a mechanism for creating mini-mes. We confuse our preferences with moral requirements and call obedience good character.
And if we are saying no all the time, we are not allowing a child to develop a sense of preference. We are not allowing them to grow into knowing what is important to them, into knowing what their unique needs are.
This becomes rather depressing, because one of the main purposes of life is to achieve a sense of fulfillment. Fulfillment is contextual, developmental, and different for every person. To lead a fulfilling life, we need to know what brings us feelings of satisfaction, and feelings of congruence with our values and our emotional system.
If we are only saying no, we interrupt the development of a self-concept that would know how to say yes to its own priorities.
A Working Ethic: Fulfillment Without Harm
Now take a child running around screaming in a restaurant, bumping into the waitstaff. A server drops a tray all over the place. It creates such excitement and noise and power that the kid starts laughing hysterically and decides he wants to push another server over. Is that authentic?
On the flip side, we all know the other examples. A wonderful kid with this super cool fluidity wants to dance his own way, not the way we are, quote, supposed to dance. His father is uncomfortable with how esoteric his child is. Or a four-year-old is doing cartwheels on the soccer field and picking dandelions, and the answer is no, you can’t do that. Perhaps the four-year-old isn’t harming anything in this instance, and maybe cartwheels are okay. Is that also authentic?
There seems to be something like a global ethic here. If a child is achieving a sense of fulfillment at no harm to anybody else, withholding our nos may be in the best interest of their development. When what we are calling authenticity disrupts unnecessarily and causes harm to those around, that may be where there is a no.
The Gray Area: Offense Without Harm
The gray area, and it often is gray, is when a presentation of ourselves that shouldn’t cause anybody a felt sense of discomfort or harm conflicts with an ideology, a belief system, and creates offense.
Say we are traveling with our nine-year-old in a culture where boys and men wearing shorts isn’t appropriate, and everyone wears pants. It’s hot. He wants to wear shorts, and he has a reasonable case: he values comfort, and he doesn’t want to be too hot. But it will be very disrespectful to the people of that culture.
There are contextual and relative variables here, and I don’t think we can find a universal answer. If we are visiting, in that culture’s homeland, perhaps we make some adaptations. We adhere more to the cultural boundaries around us, and as the parent, we tell our nine-year-old to wear the pants, even though he is hot.
At home in America, where we are a convergence of many cultures, the same holds in the other direction. We offer compassion for the uncomfortable emotional response in the person who doesn’t like boys wearing shorts, and we let him wear the shorts.
There is a difference between asking a child to become a copy of us and helping them live with the fact that their freedom exists beside everyone else’s.
