We no longer negotiate with children in this house...

Well maybe sometimes... and maybe if they are well behaved and quiet....

I declare that in my house, we are no longer a democracy, but a dictatorship, and I am the dictator (okay... co-dictator... the other parent has a say too...sometimes...). This house shall no longer be ruled by an eight-year-old tyrant.

I am just so tired of asking for things over, and over, and over, and over again. And these are not even big, time consuming, absolutely no fun things like clean your room. All I want is for my daughter to wash her hands and come to dinner. This should not take twenty minutes.

Though I want to encourage my daughter's preparation to become a lawyer (the child tries to find any technicality to weasel her way or bargain her way out of doing things), the countless minutes/hours of negotiating with her to do the littlest thing is grating on my nerves. Why must everything be done in “five minutes, mom?” which in child time spans can range from anywhere from an actual five minutes to half an hour.

All I want is a couple of days in a roll (I have even given up the hope of it lasting a full week) of me not leaving my house in the morning angry, because we wasted half our morning 'negotiating' an extra five minutes of TV or five minutes of petting the dog, which if you think about it is not that bad, but my daughter is a dawdler and is easily distracted, by air molecules... that extra 10 minutes is the difference between a leisurely, happy stroll to school or a mad dash up the hill.

I have tried the natural consequences route. I have explained it to her, repeatedly, that if she eats a bit faster or skips her television show, she can play with the puppy longer; or if she does not want to play with the puppy that is fine too, then she can have more TV. I have tried the not rushing thing and just show up late to school. Guess what, she does not care. She whines a bit about being late, which is annoying, but in the end she runs in, sees her friends and forgets all about it.

So I have now put my foot down. She will do what I say when I say it.

However, my problem is that I do not want her to grow up and just blindly follow orders (with the exception of mine, of course). I want her to question authority if she feels that something is wrong. I want her to be able to stand up and think for herself and to find her voice.

But my feeling is that she is still in single digits, and for now, mommy does know better in some things, so she really should listen and do what mommy tells her to, for now. However I told her that she can always ask me why I told her to do certain things after she does them. In fact, I encourage her to always ask me why, but after. And, I promised her that if she shows that she is listening better, she can start asking 'why' before she does the thing, and maybe we can negotiate about starting to negotiate again.