My son has been on a card collecting kick lately. Anything from sports cards, “vintage” cards from his dad, Pokemon, whatever he can get his hands on or can trade with his friends or some unsuspecting kid who doesn’t know the value of the cards in their collection. A few days ago he asked if he could look on my phone to pick and buy some Pokemon cards. I told him he could if he finished his morning steps. Nothing gets that kid moving faster on his daily steps than getting to do something he really wants to do. He picked out what he wanted and asked if I could buy them, and he’d pack me back.
I said maybe.
And I meant it. It wasn’t a soft no, not even a stall tactic, but an actual maybe. But buying the cards isn’t just offering up my credit card number. It’s a bigger conversation about how much he’s spending, how much he’s saving, whether the cards are actually worth what he’s about to pay, whether the price includes shipping and tax and who’s paying that (big surprise, he thinks it should be me!), whether we’re buying these to collect or to resell and is it actually worth anything or what he’s hoping for. I didn’t have the bandwidth for that conversation in the 10 minutes before we left for school. So I said maybe, genuinely meaning I didn’t know yet, let’s see and loop daddy into the conversation too because he’ll have an opinion about all this too.
By that afternoon when he got home from camp, neither of us remembered. The cards never got bought. By the next morning he brought it up like I’d broken a promise, and got hit with “but you said we would buy the cards.” I told him that I hadn’t, I’d said maybe. What followed was a real meltdown, the kind that derails a morning. And here’s the part that stings a little. I have at least 20 carts sitting in different browser tabs on my phone right now of both things I’ve genuinely meant to buy and haven’t gotten around to it, to window shopping and realizing I want too many things and letting time make the decision of whether it gets purchased. So I know exactly what an unresolved maybe feels like. My son doesn’t have the same category to file that maybe under yet. To him, ‘maybe’ wasn’t a placeholder. It was a yes that hadn’t happened yet, and he was ready to collect.
A 2026 study in Child Development tested whether 3 and 4 year old kids could reliably tell the difference between possibilities and certainties (Leahy, 2026). At 3 years old, most kids couldn’t make that distinction consistently. But by age 4, most could, though we should read this as - not all of them did. That is an important distinction. Related research on how kids learn words like “can” and “have to” confirm that children often use the vocabulary correctly before they understand what its actually doing conceptually. Another example of this that many families can relate to is when your child has a grammatically correct sentence with a cuss word with perfect emphasis. Using the word correctly is stage one. Understanding the concept and meaning behind it is stage two, and the gap between them can run a year or more behind each other.
Here’s where it connects to a the yes problem. Before that concept is online, those possibilities and certainties fall into a single category in your child’s mind. That’s exactly what happened with the Pokemon cards. My ‘maybe’ got filed as a delayed yes when it very much wasn’t.
Under the age of 4, and honestly, in any high-stakes moment regardless of age (because I will be honest here, my son is 8, well the age where this should be online for him), I’m trying to skip the hedge when I mean no, not yet, or I genuinely don’t know by saying what I mean, “I don’t have the bandwidth to figure this out right now, we’ll talk after school.” It carries the same honesty as the maybe, without setting up a promise nobody remembers making. That also means sitting with the disappointment, big feelings, anger, whatever emotion that comes up with the answer I am giving. That takes its own bandwidth but that is how children learn patience, or feeling disappointed, or understanding needs and wants, and time when things like buying Pokemon cards can happen and when they can’t.
As I mentioned, my son is well past the age range the study tested, and the meltdown happened anyways. The underlying mechanism doesn’t necessarily finishing resolving on a birthday. And one of the things I tell parents I work with is, chronological age and developmental age are not the same thing. Under real stakes and real desires, that collapse between possible and certain can still show up later than the study’s window, and if it’s a repeating pattern with an older kid, that’s information worth paying attention to, not a discipline problem.
Here is where we are today: I still have 20+ carts open on my phone. My son now knows one of the reasons why a maybe from isn’t a yes. We are both still working on taking other people’s maybe as an actual maybe, and not a yes. Because he does absolutely get that from me. But I hope he learns this lesson before his 41st birthday…
If the maybe meltdown is a repeated pattern in your house, especially with a kid past the age you’d expect this to resolve, that’s exactly what we work through on a discovery call. Book one here.
If you know someone who is struggling with the maybe, maybe-yes game, send this their way. It explains alot and helps parents know what other families are experiencing and how to handle those situations.
Free gets you the research. Paid gets me, looking at your actual kid, answering your questions about them.
By Lauren GreenoChild & Adolescent Development Specialist & Parenting Coach | Founder, The Parenting Collaborative
Lauren specializes in helping parents understand invisible dynamics shaping their children’s development and redesigning family systems before patterns calcify into adult identity. With expertise in child development, family systems theory, and trauma-informed parenting, she works with families navigating sibling dynamics, only child considerations, neurodivergence, emotional regulation, and breaking generational patterns.
Work with Lauren: Book a discovery call | Learn more| Instagram | TikTok
References:
Cournane, A., Dieuleveut, A., Repetti-Ludlow, C., & Hacquard, V. (2025). Word learning challenges explain nonadult possibility language comprehension in preschoolers. Developmental Psychology, 62, 1048–1066. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0002061
Leahy, B. (2026). Comprehension of “can” predicts performance on a nonverbal measure of modal concepts at 48 but not 36 months. Child Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/chidev/aacag108
Leahy, B., & Carey, S. (2020). The acquisition of modal concepts. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24, 65–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.11.004
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