Nanny knows best, but how well does she negotiate? Natural ability is a gift possessed by some deal-doers, but for most it is a skill honed through practice and experience.
We all start early, winning attention and nurture with newborn cries and infant smiles, and the nursery is a hothouse for the cultivation of bargaining expertise. Children quickly learn to modify their behaviour to gain reward or avoid disapprobation, but there’s a reciprocal benefit. Parents also experience a crash course in negotiation techniques. It may lack theory modules, but it runs 24/7 and is a 20-year syllabus!
How many non-parents enjoy such a wealth of continuing professional development? Asserting that parents negotiate better than others is a sweeping generalisation, but it is a collateral benefit of the sleepless nights.
My favourite parent-child anecdote is the nine-year-old who downloaded a bizarre ringtone onto Dad’s phone and demanded £5 to remove it. Dad is holding out. He may be a technophobe, but he’s an arch-negotiator who knows his offspring will soon want something else from him. What’s more he’s thick-skinned enough to put up with the strange noises and he gains emotional reward from defeating the blackmail.
Although one-off transactions can be rough, too much competitiveness or aggression often leads to a sub-optimal conclusion when negotiating within a long-term relationship. Most families can cope with tantrums and the culprit rarely wins.
So what is it that parents learn? Being firm but flexible knowing which points not to push can get babies to sleep through and teenagers to go to bed, and generally it helps counterparties know your boundaries while seeing opportunities for agreement.
Communication and understanding between the parties is key to a good deal, however far apart their ideas of the ideal settlement are. Family negotiations sometimes stumble because children’s logic appears flawed, but understanding why the toddler likes smearing jam on the furniture (it’s a tactile thing) can avoid the little darling taking life exploration one stage further and starting to get a kick out of your reaction after the 7th recurrence. Listening and explaining (which means making sure they understand, not just that you’ve spelt something out) is as self-evident a facet of parenting as it is an absent feature of many failed negotiations.
A small child was sent to sit on the naughty step. Dad never could understand why, as soon as his back was turned, his toddler would get off the step. Did the child think that if she couldn’t see dad’s face, dad didn’t know she’d got up? Then dad had a better idea he put jelly beans on the stair.
The author’s teenage daughters have persuaded him to point out that the examples are nothing to do with them.
Chris Laughton is a licensed insolvency practitioner and a restructuring and insolvency partner at Mercer & Hole
Tags: Parents, Negotiations, Mercer-hole
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