Originally Posted by aquinas
This may not be the answer you're looking for, but...I'm of the opinion that this is a desirable behaviour. On this forum, we frequently encounter challenges in school and other settings outside the home, and self-advocacy by our children is often what tips the balance in favour of our children's needs being met. Building that self-advocacy skill from an early age is advantageous and a trait we should foster in our children as adults! You're already ahead of the game. smile

Your daughter's negotiation demonstrates a solid understanding of the intended ask from you, and a capacity to reason laterally. (I'm very much a better-to-beg-forgiveness-than-ask-permission kind of person, so perhaps that's personal bias speaking.)

Really, what it boils down to is the need for you to carefully craft your instructions. With my DS6, I've been "trained" to give clear, pointed directions with minimal room for re-interpretation. We have a house rule that, if DS can negotiate his way logically out of a framework I've established, he's earned whatever reward he wanted. (Reasonable limits around safety and feasibility still apply.)

It also helps to explain the general spirit of what you're hoping to achieve, and why that outcome is important to you, to motivate your child. Like Dude and his DD, I've been impressed at times by DS' ability to craft a solution outside the range of options I expected--and we were both better off for his advocacy.

As an induction period, you might want to experiment with tightening up single-directive asks, then progress to multi-step instructions.

So, if DS is asked to complete a task, it has a clearly defined desired outcome, a timeframe for completion, and a sequence (if multiple asks are involved). For us, self-care in the morning before school was a frequent challenge, so I just gave him X amount of time on the clock to complete Y, and it was up to him to self-manage the time in order to earn a time-sensitive reward.

Dinnertime was another frequent area of contention, with multiple rounds of negotiations and post-settlement settlements that would bring a admiring nod from even the most hard-driving international trade negotiator. What seems to have worked is reaching a mutually satisfactory pre-dinner agreement, and holding a dessert in "escrow" for after dinner is eaten.

I agree with this and it's in line with what we do with our DS4.

We stick to clear, concise directives to avoid the debate that ambiguity invites. And in those circumstances where we aren't clear and he interprets the rules/directions/orders in a way that we didn't expect, we generally concede that his interpretation is as valid as the intended interpretation and go with it - unless he's going to hurt himself.

Giving him that type of freedom to apply his own interpretation to the rules actually makes things easier. Now when we insist that a directive be followed in a specific manner, he knows that we're serious and we don't get the usual pushback.