Parents often phrase commands as questions, pressuring kids to say yes when they'd rather say no. The fix: ask real yes/no questions only when you'll accept either answer, and make actual commands clear. This teaches children their preferences matter.
Let me give you an example of something that I might have done as a parent and I can now recognize, ooh, that laid that law down. I can see where that happened. One of these. Hey, you gonna mow the lawn by 5 o'clock tonight? Oh, you got something going on? Oh, you're still mowing the lawn by 5 o'clock tonight. By the way, is that how many of us were raised? Parent asked you to do something, you said no. Well, you're still doing it. Is that how we were raised, yes or no? Yes. Could we have accidentally done this at some point in our lives as a parent already, yes or no? And they just learned that if somebody's important, If I care about somebody, you never say— Oh, wow. So some of you go, well, how do I reverse this? You go back and say, hey, I at times have given you commands and presented them as questions. Totally unfair of me. I shouldn't have. I should have had a command's a command and a question's a question. So from now on, if I ever ask you a yes or no, you are safe to say yes or no, and I will honor your answer, or I shouldn't have asked.
