Why saying no to your kids is so hard

On paper, the word ‘no’ is a simple, single syllable. Easy to spell, but sometimes much harder to say. Saying no to others, hasn’t come easily to me over the years, as the fear of disappointing others has been such a huge one to navigate. However finding my ‘no’ has one of the most important things to become confident at. Life changing in fact. If you find it hard to say no, especially to your children, then this is for you!

When it comes to our children. it’s not that we struggle to form the word ‘no’, we struggle to watch our children feel disappointed, knowing that it was our boundary, our decision that has caused the meltdown, the discomfort, the grief, the upset. And the reason we struggle to watch them be disappointed has almost nothing to do with them, and a great deal to do with our own relationship with disappointment.

Here are five things I have found so helpful in holding those boundaries, or decisions, even in the face of disappointment:

1. The difficult thing isn’t the ‘no’, the trouble is managing the resulting disappointment

If saying no had no emotional consequence, it would be easy. No more TV it’s bedtime, no sweets before dinner, no we’re not buying you a phone even though some of your friends have one (my current battle…apparently EVERYONE in my son’s class of 11 year olds has a phone). Done.

The reason it is hard is what comes after…the face, the wail, the body flopping onto the floor, the eyeroll. The fifteen “but why not?s”

We are not really negotiating about the third biscuit, the TV or the phone, we are bracing for the storm of feeling that the no is about to unleash. And on a tired Tuesday evening, it can be much easier to steamroll the boundary than to weather the storm.

The first step is to notice this clearly. The work isn’t about finding a firmer no, it’s becoming someone who can can wether the storm of disappointment that follows.

2. You may have learned, long ago, that disappointment was unsafe.

If in your own childhood, your disappointment was met with frustration, dismissal, impatience, or coldness, you learned that disappointment was a feeling that threatened connection with a vital caregiver. That if you were upset, the people you needed might pull away from you.

So you became excellent at managing it, you learned to want less, to expect less, to not make a fuss, to not be the difficult one. Now, decades later, you are faced with a child whose disappointment is aimed directly at you. Their distress does not just bother you in the ordinary way that watching a loved one struggle bothers anyone, it touches something much older. It triggers a deep sense that disappointment breaks things, risks connection, isn’t survivable. Therefore you need to fix it, fast and make it better, before something bad happens.

So you flatten and flex the boundary. It’s not that you’re weak, it’s that you might be trying to protect your child from a feeling you never learnt to withstand, or one that felt threatening.

3. Your child’s disappointment is not harmful to them.

Your child’s being disappointed is data, not harm. It is them encountering the feeling of what they want, and learning that the world has boundaries. That sometimes want and need are two different things. And I truly believe this is one of the most important pieces of emotional learning!

As adults we whether disappointment often, the job we didn’t get, the holiday that got cancelled, the friend who let us down. It hurts, but it’s survivable. Good, strong relationships can handle disappointment without crumbling, however uncomfortable it may be. And the ability to trust that others around you can handle the feeling of disappointment when you say ‘no’ because you don’t have capacity to commit to that extra role at work, or the friend who needs another favour, the family member who is asking too much…. this is not selfish. It’s one of the most respectful things you can offer the people in your life. Because every no you give honestly and authentically, even if hard, is a yes you can mean elsewhere.

(If you want to grow in more confidence in holding boundaries, you might enjoy my ‘Better Boundaries’ video workshop)

So, you are not breaking your child by saying no. You are introducing them, in small doses, to a reality they are going to have to live in for the rest of their lives. They will learn that even with disappointment, the relationship holds and the disappointment passes.

4. A warm and wise ‘no’ isn’t a withdrawal of love, it is an act of it.

We may have grown up associating no with rejection or coldness. With “because I said so” delivered through clenched teeth. So when we go to say no to our own children, we can brace, as though we are about to do something cruel. However, no can be one of the kindest things you say all day, if it is held with warm confident steadiness.

The script can be as simple as this: “Not now, my love. I know you really want it, I can see how disappointed you are. The answer is still no”

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