Agency: It reduces conflict and gets kids to eat salad. Bonus photo of our Goose family.
Parenting Matters #11
By: Catherine Lynch and Glenn Collins
Dear awesome parent,
Summer is almost here and your kid has plans for how they want to spend their free time. How much agency should you give them? Enjoy this little piece on the drive for autonomy, how to give them more, and some of the good things that happen when they get some.
Who’s in charge of your kids’ lives?
When was the last time you wanted your kid to do something, like chores or homework, and they wanted to do something else, like play video games, talk to friends, or spend time on their device? It happened regularly at our house, and we bet it does in your’s too!
This tug of war over who’s in charge of their time and activities lies at the heart of much of the conflict between parents and their kids. If parents can’t find a way work with their kids’ desire to be in charge of their own lives, it can permanently damage their relationship. And it only gets worse as they get older.
We all have a desire to be in control of our lives. It’s wired into us at a basic level. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink discusses three primary internal motivators of human behavior. Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. He defines autonomy as: “the need to direct your own life and work. To be fully motivated, you must be able to control what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.” His book is mostly concerned with the motivation of adults in the workplace, but the drive for autonomy exists in all humans - including our children.
“Autonomy is the need to direct your own life and work. To be fully motivated, you must be able to control what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.” - Daniel Pink
This drive for autonomy has the potential to create conflict between parents and kids. The question then becomes Is there a way to harness this drive instead of it just being a pain?
Yes. Give them more agency over their lives. Especially areas that are important to them.
We can already hear the objections: “Whoa! If I give them more control over (name your biggest worry), they might make a bad decision and screw up.” That’s true, they might.
But as Mark Twain put it:
“Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.” - Mark Twain
That’s why we advocate for guardrails and safety nets:
Guardrails: Reasonable limits on what you give them the freedom to make decisions about. But inside those guardrails, let them chart their own course. Good questions to ask yourself when deciding where to set the guardrails:
What’s the worst that can happen if they make a poor choice?
How likely is that outcome given my kid’s judgment and skills?
Can my kid handle the consequences?
Can I?
What’s more important: that we get the outcome we want, or that my kids learns and grows from this experience?
Safety net. Your presence and good relationship is the safety net. If they screw up - and they will - you’re there to catch them. To give empathy, compassion, and a shoulder to lean on. To offer advice and help if they ask for it, and to limit to amount of serious damage. Natural consequences are powerful teachers. Challenge yourself to intervene much less than you’d like to.
Remember: The quality of your relationship with your kids has a direct impact on how much they pay attention to your guardrails.
Giving kids agency is also a great way to motivate them. When they get to make the decisions about matters that affect their lives, they’re more engaged. They have a sense of ownership. When they’re invested in something, they have heart and soul in it and are much more likely to see through to completion.
So, how much agency should you give your kids? As much as you think they can handle - and then a little bit more. Big things and little things. Because they’ll be in charge of everything when they’re on their own, and you won’t be there to help them.
Remember BEAF from last week?
Here's BEAF applied to getting your kids to eat salad.
The tl;dr version:
BEAF, applied to salad:
Belonging: We all eat salad.
Empathy: Yes, some of the lettuce leaves are bitter.
Agency: You choose which salad ingredients, how much, and which dressing.
Fun: Eat it with chopsticks. Challenge and friendly competition to see who could pick up the smallest thing with the chopsticks.
The Full Story:
Our grandkids aren’t big on green vegetables. Their parents don’t insist they eat them and we don’t want to be the greens police when they visit. We would love to help them learn to make healthy food choices (at least most of the time 😃🍕🍩🍦) So, how do we make them want to?
Last week three of our grandkids were over and we applied the BEAF Framework to see if we could get them to want to eat salad - something we’ve tried before without much success. Spoiler: It worked way better than we’d hoped it would!
While we did use Belonging (emphasized that we try to make healthy food choices for our bodies) and Empathy (we understand that greens are bitter sometimes), the part that really worked was giving them Agency.
It worked so well that Agency is our new favorite answer to that perennial question: “How do we get the kids to eat more vegetables?”
Answer: Give them lots of say over it! In this instance they took the idea of salad and ran with it. They came up with things we’d never have thought of and created an activity where they had a whole lot of fun. We weren’t shooting for fun (we just wanted them to eat some salad) but when we gave them control, they made it fun.
Here’s how it went down:
We bought the family size box of mixed greens. There were lots of different shades of greens, reds and purples. They were small and kid sized. (How perfect is that?!?!)
We brought out a bunch of different size bowls, and each kid got to choose their own bowl. (Agency)
They used salad tongs. (Fun)
They chose how much salad greens they put in their bowls. (Agency, again)
They grated the cheese and the carrots onto their own salad.
(With help b/c grated fingers are not fun.) (Hands on/playing with food/fun/agency.)
They put sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds on their salad. (More agency, plus fun because seeds are little.)
They ate their salads with chopsticks.
Novelty! Challenge! What a thrill when they succeeded in picking up those little seeds with the chopsticks! They came up with this idea all on their own.
2 more important ingredients for a successful salad:
Competition. An impromptu competition developed to see who could pick up the most salad with their chopsticks. Then they made it even more challenging: Who could pick up the littlest pieces? Shredded carrot, shredded cheese, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and for the ultimate challenge… sesame seeds! It took a while, but they all eventually succeeded with the challenges. It wasn’t very fast, and it wasn’t efficient, but boy did they have fun and they all ate ALL of their salad! Win-Win.
Casual. The salad event (and it did turn into an event) was very causal. We were at the old, cluttered island in the kitchen sitting on stools and eating out of mismatched bowls. We were not at the formal dining table eating off china and minding our manners. People, especially kids, are attracted to casual, and try to avoid formal. Casual is so much for fun!
Note: What we didn’t do might have been just as important as what we did do.
Here’s what we didn’t do:
We didn’t insist they eat salad.
We didn’t tell them what to take.
We didn’t tell them how much to take.
We didn’t tell them how to eat it.
We offered dressing, but didn’t insist.
Meet our Canada Goose family (aka loud lawn ornaments)
