The holiday season is a special time for families. It is also a very special time for retailers, a segment of business that has mastered their understanding of the cognitive processes which people bring to the shopping experience. Consumer behaviors have been studied at length by marketers to understand how to get people to buy their products. These studies also show how consumers, particularly children, get parents to buy the items they want.
A number of years ago a study was conducted by James U. McNeal, a professor of marketing, in which the ways in that children try to get their parents to buy them that one toy which they really want was examined and classified. This information is critically useful for parents who ever take their child shopping. The difference between leaving the mall with a happy child and a screaming, whining, pleading child is a big difference, and having a plan to confront the inevitable begging for a new toy can mean sanity in shopping.
There is the pleading whine: the incessant “please, mommy, please please please… I love you, please. You are the best mom, please mommy, and I promise I’ll love you forever, if you can please please please just buy me THAT fluorescent stuffed bear.”
This is not the best way for our children to go about trying to get what they want; 9 out of 10 times the parent needs to say no, and move on to the next set of stimuli.
Kids also whine forcefully: the end game here is “I must have this, it will make me the best kid in the world, and if you say no, I’m gonna hit up dad.” The child has a plan of attack, an object of desire, and willful intent. As this is ultimately an effort at manipulation, parents must be united, or a parent faced with this on their own, will simply have to be strong in their denial. It has been said that “No” is a complete sentence.
Kids will employ the threatening whine, “I’ll never talk to you again, I’ll stop eating, I will NOT move from this store until I get what I want!!!!” Obviously, this is not an effective negotiation technique, and parents cannot accept being threatened at all. The answer is no, the child will get over it, and the parents should not give in and should also teach the child more effective ways to negotiate using these instances as a starting point.
There is the pity whine and the emotionally threatening whine. “If I don’t get this toy, I will have no friends…” or “I will never speak to you again if you don’t buy me this toy!!!!!” While neither of these are tactics to give into, they also speak to an insecurity the child is feeling, and when the moment is over, it is worth talking with your child about their thoughts about how having the right toy and having friends relate to each other, or they may need to be reminded of how much they are loved.
And, finally, there is the sugar-coated whine. “Please please please, I will love you forever, do the dishes for a year, and get straight A’s if you, just please get me this toy!!” Sweet as sugar may be, this is not the way that we want to teach our children to negotiate and so, the answer to this is no.
At the heart of these different patterns of whining, is the emergence of negotiation style. Negotiation uses perception and manipulation, and parents need to teach ethical ways of negotiating. This is a communication issue as well, and parents may find that the child’s whining style mirrors the style in which the parent asks the child to do something. In any event, a wide range of negotiating and communicating in-roads is more effective than any one single approach.
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