With young toddlers, choices are often the most appropriate way to involve them in the solution to an issue.  However, you can teach older toddlers and children to come up with their own suggested solutions of how to meet your objective. 

When my son turned three, he started rejecting my choices.  “I don’t want to do either, I want to do X”.  At the time, I thought we had “outgrown” this method. Now, I believe that I simply failed to recognize that he was ready for more responsibility in the process.

Brainstorming a solution starts with the parent stating a limit, a problem, or a need—this is your objective.  If the child doesn’t buy into the objective, listening and empathy is required to understand what conflicting needs he has, so that your solutions can incorporate them in also. Once the child feels heard, and understood, the parent can explain her needs and feelings. When you are brainstorming a solution, it is important not to fall back into “convincing” the child that the limit itself is valid—that is where the empathy comes in.  (More on Empathy).

Sometimes arguing and negotiating a solution seem like the same thing, but in fact, they are vastly different. Offering a solution (or rejecting one) conveys the speaker’s needs, whereas arguing tries to convince the listener. Once two people start arguing, each one “locks in” on one solution and shuts down their hearing of the other person’s view. Also, convincing opens the issue for argument about who is “right”.  When you imply that your way is correct, and you give reasons, the child naturally wants to prove to you that his reasons are more valid and correct than yours – because to him, they are! 

One way to brainstorm a solution with children just learning the process is to ask thinking questions-  “Would you like to say goodbye to Grandma before we leave?”; “How can you touch me so that it doesn’t hurt me?”, “What needs to happen with these cars before we leave?”  The answer may seem obvious to you – but you will probably be surprised by what the child will come up with.  My son has answered, “They need to all be lined up in a row.”  Another child might say, “Oh!  I need to say goodbye to them!”

The next level of brainstorming a solution, as your child gets older, is to reflect his needs, state your needs, and ask the child to suggest solutions that meet those needs and solve the issue.  Although this takes a couple more minutes, he is learning how to consider both his own needs and other’s needs in a respectful way.

One caveat – I’ve often found that the surface-level issue is not the issue at all.  When this is the case, brainstorming a solution or offering choices about the surface issue will not work very well.  For example, if your child gets upset in a store apparently because she cannot have something she sees, or because you put something into the cart that she doesn’t want there, it’s likely that the real issue is sensory stimulation.  In this case her need for control is very intense because her environment feels chaotic.   Be sure that you have connected to the true need.  Your limit is still valid – “It’s not OK to hit me when you don’t get what you want”, but your solution may be vastly different, such as offering her a hug and talking very quietly to help her calm herself, or allowing her to do more of the choosing of items that go into the cart to increase her feeling of control.

Lisa Stroyan