Kids Need to Hear ‘No’ More

Photo-Illustration: the Cut; Photos Getty Images

A few weeks ago, my 1-year-old and I were just sitting down for circle time at a local community center when a pre-schooler ran over to my purse and started tossing stuff out of it. It happened quickly, and I instinctively grabbed it, moving it to my other side, mindful that I have medication and loose change and all kinds of other stuff little ones shouldn’t get hold of.

As I moved it, I gently said “no” to the young kid who dropped the purse and continued on playing unfazed, and I went back to singing “zoom, zoom, zoom, we’re going to the moon” with my own wiggly toddler. I thought absolutely nothing of it until snack time when the boy’s mom cornered me while the kids shoveled cheese hunks and carrot sticks into their mouths.

“I didn’t like your tone when you spoke to my baby,” she said. I was caught off-guard — I had barely had time to even have a tone. My “no” was firm but kind.

I could tell from her face that she wanted an apology from me, wanted me to recant and repent for my sins, but I wasn’t in the mood. I said that kids need to hear “no” sometimes and that I meant no harm before walking back over to my baby. Afterward, I watched her spend the rest of the free time anxiously hovering over her curious, active child, clapping and congratulating every time he did, well, literally anything.

But as much as I tried to ignore the interaction, I couldn’t stop thinking about what she was saying to me in that moment, that I had done something egregious, something worth confronting me over, simply by telling her child he couldn’t do something. People have done some wild things to me and my child at the playground or at a local drop-in center like the one we were in and unless it warrants a major intervention, I’ve always let it go – it’s Mad Max rules out there. So I guess what I was supposed to take away from the interaction was that my version of parenting in that moment was wrong and hers was right.

Frustrated and wanting to vent, I tweeted about it after, not expecting much of a reaction. I watched in amazement as it quickly went viral with over 600,000 likes and 100,000 retweets in a day.

My first thought — not entirely wrong — was that people on X really hate kids, but I could also see it had struck a nerve with a lot of parents, school teachers, and anyone who deals with “kids these days.”

One high-school teacher told me he’d recently been chatting with his students about their comprehension of a subject when they told him he was “crashing out.” He wished their parents would, “yell at them more,” he confessed. A teacher from San Diego told me her students treat assignments as optional, think that anything can be redone for full credit, and that they often give teachers directives rather than requests, treating them as they do their parents. The parents are no better, she said, with one example of a couple who asked that their daughter’s late arrivals not be counted because, “she has a hard time getting up in the morning.” Many, many others shared similar sentiments about how much, or how little, kids seem to have boundaries or hear “no.”

When my eldest son was around 6 months old, my mom sent me an article, one of many on child-rearing she sent me that first year, about how important it was to avoid saying “no” to kids. Funny, because I don’t remember my mom avoiding “no” when I was a kid. Which is fair enough, there were three of us girls, very close in age, who often tried to get away with as much as we could and argued like little lawyers until we heard that “no.” I don’t remember our worlds ending over the word. Nonetheless, I read a bit of the article and absorbed it into my ideas around parenting at the time. I told myself I would adhere to the “gentle parenting” mode because I was so moved by the ethos to treat kids with respect, love, and empathy.

And for the first three-and-a-half years of my son’s life, I overdid it — I gentle-parented the shit out of that kid. Then my second child turned 1.

Here’s something people really didn’t tell me when I decided to have more than one kid: They’re not the same. In fact, are they even genetically related? Because everything that was true for my calm, sweet, docile, rule-observant first child was absolutely flipped on its head with my fiery, independent, intense, sparkplug of a second child.

A lot of that gentle parenting I’d smugly thought I’d mastered went out the window, and first to go was the avoidance of “no.” When my toddler would bolt out into the road — a busy, city road where drivers are often on their phones and bombing through reds — I didn’t have time to calmly instruct her on why we don’t cross the street when a car is driving through it. I could barely squawk out “no!” In that instance, though, “no” proved very sufficient and efficient. When my baby wanted to crawl up our very steep stairs at 10 months, though he’d barely mastered standing on his feet? It’s a no! When my daughter drops a “Fucking Jesus” in frustration, that’s a stifled laugh and a no. Of course, my husband and I always explain the reasoning behind the no, but in the heat of the moment, “no” is pretty fucking useful. And because we have always backed up our boundaries with a why, my kids hear our nos, change their behavior, then carry on, unscathed.

After saying “no” to that pre-schooler, I’ve wondered a lot if I did the right thing — but I keep coming back to how little I actually did. I just said, “no.” And now her son knows someone else’s purse is a hard boundary not to cross. I wish some (kind) stranger would teach my kids something like that for free.

A few days ago when I was chatting with my daughter’s kindergarten teacher at drop-off, he complimented her manners, saying that she always said “please” and “thank you” in class. I told him how important politeness is to me and he laughed — rolling his eyes about the stories he could tell me of how awry things can get with the students.

Then he shared an anecdote about my eldest son when he’d been in kindergarten. The class had been asked to sit on the floor to read a book, but my son stayed seated at a table. When this teacher asked him to move down, he said, “No thanks, I prefer to sit here.” My first instinct was to congratulate my son on his manners and conviction in his truth — but then I thought of this teacher. Of what it would be like to try to get anything done in a room full of kids who are used to having their way all the time, who respond to everything with some version of “eh, I prefer to do it my way.”

You only have to look to the highest office to see what happens when you build the world around people who have never been told “no,” when someone surrounds themselves with “yes” people who are too scared to intervene. We’re seeing in Technicolor what happens when you grow up with no regard for other people.

There’s absolutely no harm in having some hard lines for each other, in saying “no” when it matters, especially when it comes to teaching kids what’s safe and how to respect the boundaries of others. It’s how we maintain a decent society, and that’s a big part of what I’m trying to do with my kids in every aspect of my parenting — can they be thoughtful members of their community? Can they be mindful that they are just one part of a bigger whole and not the whole itself? I hope in the end it all balances out. And if you see my kids acting feral out in the world, please feel free to tell them “no.”