It hit me at my daughter’s house.
I was watching her negotiate with my granddaughter about a cookie. Lila is four. She had wandered into the kitchen, asked for one, and been told that we were about to have lunch, and could she wait until after.
What followed wasn’t a tantrum. She tilted her head, and she said, in her four-year-old voice, “But what if I just had a little bit of one?”
And my daughter, in her thirty-five-year-old voice, said, “Well, how about half a cookie now and the other half after lunch?”
And Lila said, “Or maybe a whole one and a smaller lunch?” And my daughter laughed and said, “Let’s see what we can work out.”
I watched the whole exchange. And somewhere in the middle of it, I realized I was watching myself. The patient explanation. The willingness to talk it through. The total absence, anywhere in the negotiation, of a simple no.
I had taught my daughter to do this. I had taught her without knowing I was teaching her, by doing it with her for eighteen years, and now she was doing it with her own daughter, and I had to sit with the wave of guilt that landed and pretend I was fine.
The way I raised them was warm, and almost always a yes
My kids never had to sit with a flat no from me. Not really.
If they asked for something, we talked about it. If they wanted to stay up later, we found a compromise. If they didn’t want to do their homework, we negotiated around their feelings about the homework before we got to the part where it had to be done.
I prided myself, in those years, on being the kind of mother who didn’t dismiss anything they brought to me.
I listened. I considered. I tried to find a way to honor what they were asking for, even when I had to refuse the specific thing.
It was warmth, partly. My kids grew up feeling heard. They grew up knowing they could come to me with anything. They’re loving adults now and loving parents in their own right, and I don’t think any of that was an accident.
But there was something else underneath the warmth that I didn’t see at the time.
By making every no into a long discussion, by treating their disappointment as something to be managed and softened, I was teaching them — without ever saying it — that the disappointment itself was the problem. That if we just talked it through carefully enough, with enough love and enough patience, the no wouldn’t have to fully land. There was always going to be a way around it, or through it, or some version that felt close enough to a yes that the no didn’t quite count.
I thought I was being a good mother. I was being a good mother, in many ways. I just didn’t know that the absence of friction was its own kind of lesson.
I was determined not to be like my parents
My mother said no. That was almost the whole of her parenting vocabulary. She’d grown up during the Depression with five siblings and a father who didn’t believe children should be heard, and she’d raised my brother and me the same way, because that’s what she knew.
There was no negotiation. There was no explanation.
If I asked why I couldn’t do something, the answer was, “Because I said so.” If I cried, I was sent to my room until I could come out without crying. If I wanted something my parents had decided I couldn’t have, the conversation was over before it started.
My father wasn’t unkind, exactly. He was just absent in the way men of his generation often were — at work, in the garage, behind the newspaper. He provided. He showed up at things he was supposed to show up at. He didn’t know how to talk to a child about anything that wasn’t homework or chores, and so mostly, he didn’t talk to us at all.
I left that house at eighteen and made myself a promise:
When I had my own children, they were going to know what I had not known — that they were heard, that their feelings mattered, that there was a parent who would actually sit down across from them and talk about whatever it was. I was not going to be the parent who said no without explanation. I was not going to be the parent who said nothing at all.
I made good on the promise. I just didn’t realize, at twenty-five, that you can swing a hammer in the right direction and still hit something you didn’t mean to hit.
More Bolde Stories
What I worry my grandkid is learning without anyone meaning to teach them
Lila is four, and she already knows that no is not a fixed answer.
She knows that if she asks the right way, with the right small explanation of why her version is reasonable, the no will soften into a yes-but, and the yes-but will keep softening until it’s mostly a yes with conditions. She has learned this not because anyone has told her, but because she has lived inside a household where this is how the negotiations go.
I watch her, and I think about what happens when she’s twenty, and her boss says no, and there isn’t a tilt of the head that fixes it. Research on permissive parenting has consistently found that kids who grow up without much experience of frustration tend to have a harder time managing it as adults — not because they’re spoiled in any obvious way, but because they haven’t had the small, repeated practice of sitting with a disappointment that doesn’t get negotiated away.
The same research is careful to draw a line I wish I’d known about thirty years ago: being warm and responsive to your children isn’t the problem. The problem is when warmth replaces structure instead of accompanying it.
My daughter is warm. My daughter is responsive. My daughter is, in many ways, a better mother than I was. But I see her doing the same thing I did, and I worry that Lila is going to have to learn, in her twenties or thirties, what I should have given her the chance to learn in small doses as a child.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything to my daughter
If I say something, what would I say? My daughter is doing her best, the same way I did my best, and she would hear any comment from me as criticism — of her, of her parenting, of the choices she’s making in real time with a child I love. She might also hear it, accurately, as her mother trying to undo a legacy at her grandchild’s expense. I don’t know that I have the right to point at something I taught her, after she’s spent her adult life building a self around it.
But if I don’t say anything, I watch Lila learn the same thing my daughter learned, and I keep my mouth shut about it for the rest of my life. That feels like its own small failure. The grandmother who saw it coming and decided her own comfort was more important than the truth.
I haven’t figured out where I land on this. I suspect I’m not going to land anywhere clean. Maybe I’ll say something one day, in a way that doesn’t sound like an accusation. Maybe I’ll keep being quiet, and the chance to say something will pass. Either way, I’m going to have to live with the version of myself who let this happen.
What I’ve decided, for now, is just to be a little different when it’s my turn with the grandkids.
I don’t want to be the grandmother who comes in and starts saying no on purpose, like some kind of corrective. That would be its own kind of overcorrection, and it would put my daughter in the position of having to manage me in her own house, which she shouldn’t have to do.
I just mean, in the small moments — when Lila asks me for something I don’t think she should have, I’m trying to say no without then immediately offering three alternatives. I’m trying to let her be disappointed for the thirty seconds it takes for her to move on to the next thing. I’m trying not to fill in every silence with a soft explanation. I’m trying to let her find out, in tiny doses, that someone who loves her can also tell her no and still love her on the other side of it.
It’s not enough. I know that. But it’s the part I have, and at my age, the part you have is the part you work with.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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