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6 Negotiating at Home • Multiple agendas. At home, there are always three levels of nego- tiations going on at the same time. • There is the specific issue at hand. What solution will work for both of us? • There is the concern for the long-term effects of the decision itself. Am I setting a problematic precedent here? • There is the concern for the long-term effects on your relation- ship with your child. Will this decision have spill-over conse- quences for us? This is a lot of baggage to add on top of the already difficult task of negotiating. NEGOTIATING BY THE NUMBERS On average, we negotiate with our kids six times a day (which leads to 182 negotiations a month). Each negotiation lasts an average of eight minutes, leading to forty-eight minutes a day of time spent in these interactions. These statistics come from a recent study of over 2,000 parents of kids between the ages of two and twelve.1 In case you wonder whether the negotiations that happen in your house are the same ones that happen in other families, these are the top five areas that monopolize our time: • Food: children not eating everything on their plate, complaining of being hungry but being unwilling to eat anything healthy, or wanting a snack or sweet before dinner or too close to bedtime • Chores: messy bedrooms, not helping with their share of the household chores, or leaving dirty laundry or dishes around • Interactions: siblings fighting with each other • Rules: trying to delay bedtime, wanting more time on electronic devices, avoiding homework, or not brushing their teeth • Responsibility: losing or breaking items, or wanting to spend money on things Undoubtedly, many interactions go smoothly. But of the 2,190 average negotiations a year, parents reported feeling successful only about half the time, and reported regularly giving in more than they wanted to, just to move forward. Yes, compromise is necessary and useful, but it can also lead to satisficing, which is the term for agreeing to any acceptable offer, even if it only barely meets your needs, instead of striving for a better agreement. We tend to satisfice more often when we’re challenged or worn out by the negotiation process, which happens a lot in negotiations with kids.