Give Them A Loophole, They’ll Swim Through It.

Another great utterance I hear coming out of parents’ mouths is that wonderful little disciplinary sentence tag “okay?”

Like: “I need you to please be quiet, okay?” or “The dog doesn’t need Tabasco sauce on his Gravy Train, okay?” or “Don’t poke the baby with your fork anymore, okay?”

Why do we do this?

Is this meant as an attempt to get down and relate to their kids at their level? I’m behind the essence of that one hundred percent. As parents we need to reach kids where they are rather than talk down to them or loom menacingly over them. In the practice of good parenting we avoid yelling or being verbally abusive to our kids, so they’ll actually listen to us and absorb our meaning.

Thus, I believe tacking the question “okay?” on to an admonition is assumed by those parents who do that to soften the blow of their words and to align the child’s will with their rebuke.

But when you stop to think about it, aren’t we really just handing our kid a tactical loophole, a natural escape clause?

Observe:
You say: “Please stop screaming, okay?”

You mean: “Please stop screaming, do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

Kid hears: “Please stop screaming, is that agreeable to you?”

I shouldn’t be surprised if the kid in this example is thinking “Well, since you ask, it’s not okay. Hence I shall continue with my screaming, thank you very much. After that I’m going to jab the baby a few more times for good measure.”

I catch myself using the “okay?” suffix from time to time, and though I’ve never had Michael nor his sisters give me any grief about it, I still wonder whether or not they weigh their options when I do.

Take charge. You don’t have to get their buy-in, you’re the parent: you tell them how it’s going to be. “I need you to stop screaming.” Or “Screaming is not acceptable. If you scream again, you’re going in time out.”

And if you find you can’t break yourself of the habit of concluding your reproach gently, then I propose instead that we all make the effort to swap the word “okay?” with the word “capisce?” It just sounds cool.