They forget the sentence and remember the feeling

When a door closes in a house, you can read the mood of the place from the sound of it. Behind that door, say, is our sixteen-year-old son. A sentence has just been spoken — usually short, usually “no”, usually the kind we believe we are right about. The closing of the door is followed by an unlovely silence…

You are not obliged to sit at the table

For years I have seen the same thing at negotiating tables: if one side does not need the other, what happens is not negotiation but imposition. At home this is exactly the situation. The parent holds the money and the permission. In the same way, the parent holds all the keys and all the passwords. A parent can end every argument they will ever have with their teenager in a single sentence: every decision means accepting its consequences and, if it comes to it, paying the price — and if you are willing to accept the consequences, you can decide anything in life.

“I want” is not a demand

One of the most basic distinctions in negotiation is that a position and a need — the honest, ethical kind of interest — are not the same thing. The position is the last demand the other person put to you: the sentence of wanting. The need is the root cause that made them say it.

“I want to go out tonight” is a position. So what is the unmet need underneath it? Perhaps their standing among their friends is slipping. Perhaps they want to prove to themselves that they can decide something alone. Or perhaps they are simply low, and nobody at home is talking to them. Those are three very different needs, and so the answer to each is different. But if you reply only to “I want to go out tonight”, you have heard none of the three. Teenagers say their positions loudly and hide their needs — sometimes even from themselves.

What if you said your own interest out loud?

Every dialogue, every relationship has two sides. Relationships look for balance, and balance is a fine and satisfying thing to arrive at. So in every dialogue the parent has a position too, and a real need. The position: “You will be home at eleven.” The need: “I cannot sleep while you are out. I am frightened. I lie there waiting for you.” Parents usually assume that saying this damages their authority. In fact, the side that names its own need honestly does not lose the table. It gives the other person real ground on which to make a counter-proposal — because what time someone comes home is arguable, and “I cannot sleep” is not.

What happens when the table closes?

When a negotiation is suspended without result, when no agreement is reached, do the parties give up what they wanted? No. They start acting unilaterally.

If negotiation collapses at home, the child does not give up. They simply choose to stop telling you.

Adolescence is a convenient time for that. Life is now flowing outside the house as well. There are ways of getting without asking what could not be got by asking, and those ways are not hard to find. So “I closed the subject” is usually a deception. The subject is very much alive and very much there; it has only moved to a layer the parent cannot see.

And if it were a daughter?

Everything I have described so far holds just as well for a sixteen-year-old girl. What changes is not the child. What changes is the ground the negotiating table is set on. With a teenage boy the negotiation is usually about how much: until what time, how often, how many lira. With a teenage girl it starts one step further back, at the question of whether she goes out at all. So what the boy negotiates is quantity, and what the girl negotiates is the right itself. She sits down at the table, in effect, already in deficit. She gets less credit for the same behavior and answers for the same lateness at greater length. That is not how a fair credit account works, and it is not how it should work. You cannot expect repayment from someone you never let use their limit. Let me say plainly here that the parent's fear is not imaginary; it is entirely real. Anxiety for a daughter in this country has a genuine basis and nobody may belittle it. But at the table we have to separate fear from control. Fear is “I am frightened something will happen to you”; it can be talked about and precautions can be worked out together. Control is “what will people say”, and that has nothing to do with the child's safety and everything to do with the family's appearance.

Ask yourself which root cause the rule you set for your daughter actually came from.

You need not tell her the answer, but tell yourself. And then let that answer tell you what the right behavior is.

And one more thing. If a girl cannot negotiate at home, she learns that she cannot negotiate outside it either. Her salary, her boundaries, her life, her choices… What a boy learns at home turns up years later somewhere else entirely: in whether or not he knows how to listen to the woman across his own table.

A last word

When you negotiate with your teenager you are in fact doing two things. The first is settling the matter of that evening.

The second — and to my mind the one that matters — is showing them what negotiation is.

Because the first negotiating tables anyone sits at are always in the family home. What is learned there is carried into a salary conversation, a partnership agreement, a marriage. Do they win by shouting, by going silent, by making you feel sorry for them — or by accepting that the person opposite has a problem of their own? The tables in the family home teach a great deal. Tonight, the answer to the argument left behind that door may look like “what you gave them”. That is partly true.

What actually leaves a mark is how you spoke to them, and the feeling that conversation left behind.

Years later they may not remember exactly which sentences left your mouth that day, but I am certain they will remember at once how those sentences made them feel. And perhaps one day, at a negotiating table in a home of their own, you will hear them use your sentence. In that moment you win more than in all the negotiations you ever won.