Phrases to use when your teens ambush you with requests

When my teens were smaller me and their dad had a line we used every time the foursome would repeatedly ask a question to which they didn’t like our initial answer. You know the kind of thing.

Them: ‘Can we get a tortoise?”

Me: “No because I would end up looking after it”.

Them: ‘Why can’t we get a tortoise?”

Me: ‘Because I would end up looking after it’.

Them: “Why are we the only family in the UK without a tortoise?’

Me: ‘Because we have a dog, which I have ended up looking after’.

And on it would go as they grew up; repeated requests for the same thing kept coming until I read a book about Danish parenting where the response to the same question asked again and again was ‘asked and answered’. This is genius I thought and used it liberally much to everyone’s frustration. It entered family folklore along with my toddler son saying forggodnesssnakes every time he dropped something.

As their childhood progressed like a bullet train the way they asked questions, or permissions changed. ‘Asked and answered’ lost its power. Frankly it became a bit of a joke. And when they hit adolescence they started to use what felt like a technique the Royal Marines may employ when wheedling information out of a spy while staying just inside violating Human Rights. Teens are all accelerator and no brakes, so they’d ambush me out of the blue while I was preoccupied with a request to do something they hadn’t done before, something that usually sparked a flame of fear in me. So if they wanted to go to a particularly notorious festival they’d ask while I was dog-tired and cleaning my teeth before bed.

They’d ask about dodgy sleepovers while my head was in the washing machine de tangling school tights, or when I was trying to find something in OneDrive. Or the requests would be for a gathering happening in two hours, a drive across London happening in 10 minutes. It became quite a pattern and mine were not unique in their last minute planning or the chaotic organisational skills: it’s just how most teens are but at first I would get flustered and just say No by default. This wasn’t helpful to anyone as they felt I wasn’t listening to them, didn’t respect them and I suspected they would just stop telling me if this went on.

So I came up with a plan based on my conversations with adolescent mental health experts and made my self a list of phrases to uses in those moments.