Yesterday was a good day. I caved on the Gatorade (one blue, one red, when really, they should have shared a single bottle), but held the line on the Skittles. After the park, we went for pizza at the usual place and I stayed firm on water at the table – no fruit punch, in spite of my deal with the waitress to secretly dilute it.
And then this small triumph: ice-cream from the van on the way home, yes. But two bites in, when one of them changed her mind about which ice-cream she wanted and the other, predictably, dropped hers on the ground and wanted a replacement – Fight, gentlemen of England! Fight, bold yeomen! – I did not give way.
When is the cave-in dangerous and when is it sensible? I can never figure this out. If you let them control you too much they’ll grow up to be mad, screaming nightmares who can’t handle the world. But inflexibility leads to behaviours too, and means you are destined to spend all your time fighting. “Pick your battles”, people say, but it’s a full-time job equivalent to directing a medium-sized movie in which you have to make 35 decisions an hour.
And they are cunning. They learn. They tiptoe up to the line, knowing that the nearer they get, the greater the likelihood they have of crossing over. Where, at first, my daughter said, “I don’t want to eat it, I just want to hold it” – delivered while eyeing the crisp packet that had been banned until after dinner – lately this has evolved into fullblown reverse psychology.
“I don’t want candy, I don’t want to get cavities!” she says winsomely, giving me a frankly terrifying look straight out of the black ops handbook. I know what she’s doing. I can see it. And yet I find myself thinking, “Oh, look what amazing powers of self-denial she has,” plus hat tip for the long game being played here. More often than not, I give in.
Then the fightback begins. “That’s not how it works” is my go-to phrase of the moment, as if there is some higher authority on everything from crisp allocation to play-date arrangements that it’s simply beyond my pay grade to challenge. I accompany this with an “I wish I could help” look and a we’re-all-victims-here shrug. “I know right?!” I say sorrowfully. “It sucks! Man.”
The psychologists say it is our job to understand the bellowing child and recognise her emotions as valid. And I do; I recognise that when someone who liked bananas yesterday decides they don’t like them today they are, at some level, trying to control their environment because it is frightening to be a child. I also recognise that control is a reflex that doesn’t always have to represent something more fraught.
Last night, I let them sleep in the clothes they’d been wearing all day, and this morning, after only the smallest amount of begging, I let them go to camp in those same clothes. They’re only four, I reasoned. They don’t sweat and dirt doesn’t kill. And, OK, they look like children from a Shirley Hughes novel who just emerged from a hedge. But my gosh, in those filthy clothes they were happy.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
