Words: Alice Olins

It all started with the Play-Doh. Daughter Number One announced an intention to bake a batch of purple, squidgy cupcakes for tea with Mr Ted and Pippi the Monkey. It sounds like an innocuous request, but the time on the clock read: 7.05am. Which is a time, I think, only convenient for drinking strong coffee and mashing Weetabix.

I said No.

To be honest, I just couldn’t be arsed to get everything out of the art cupboard so early in the morning. The paints, the pages of half-used stickers, the bags of pom-poms, the stamping kits, the pots of glitter; they all peacefully co-exist until you make a removal. I wasn’t willing to take the risk; plus daughter number two would inevitably eat the purple cakes and then there would be tears all round.

Pearl barely noticed my refusal, and play resumed as normal. But Play-Doh Gate repeated on me. Big, selfish, lazy mummy prevents young innocent child from expressing her creative side. I felt a little bit sick at the thought of it. Of course, every parent hands out a few unnecessary No’s, but for some reason, this one stuck. I decided, in a fit of guilt, to say Yes for the rest of the day.

Of course, I didn’t tell the children of my parenting about-turn. I felt bad, but I’m no fool. If they’d known, it would have been chocolate buttons for a lunch and afternoon of Peppa Pig. Actually, eating chocolate buttons and watching Peppa Pig sounded like quite a fun idea, but I wasn’t ready to completely relinquish control.

After her nap, Pearl, with the kind of silent knowing possessed only by a child, announced a desire to take off all her clothes, run once around the garden and then wash herself with the hose. It was cold outside, the garden was muddy, the baby would certainly cry and to top it all off, my mother-in-law was on her way over. I panicked. Then I paused. And just like that, ‘OK darling, let’s do it!’

Rather predictably, the naked garden event was a complete hoot. Later that night, I tapped ‘YES PARENTING’ into Google and apparently there is a whole movement out there.

Parenting coach Bea Marshall is, if you like, Yes Parenting’s Spiritual Leader. In a former life, Marshall had actually been a die-hard Super Nanny devotee; until she noticed that instead of the delightful and compliant child that SN had promised, her boy seemed increasingly unsure of himself and of her.

“One week, when my son was about two and a half, I had a series of eye-opening experiences that led me to stop in my tracks. I started to question many of the basic elements of parenting that I had believed were true.” Elements, she says, that included, mandatory please and thank you’s, enforced saying sorry and default no’s to her children’s requests. “The media loves this idea that I am the mum who never says No. But actually, Yes Parenting isn’t simply saying Yes to everything,” says Marshall. “It is founded on three key principles: Non Violent Communication (NVC), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Trusting our Children.”

I did a bit of reading on NVC and NLP. In short, they are methods of deeply connecting with your children through the basic principle of communication. The way I understood it, is that if you are going to say No, then you need to qualify that decision so that your child feels respected and listened to.

This made sense. And wasn’t, to be honest, particularly ground-breaking. In the same way that a diet makes you reassess the way you look at what you eat, it seemed to me that Yes Parenting, was really just a way of shedding a bit of light on some old parenting theories. Marshall, however, is a devout preacher: “Today, my boys are brilliant at resolving conflict between themselves and with others and they seek out solutions that work for everyone.”

When I was asked, a week or so later, whether we could have dinner with Father Christmas (it was April) I actually enjoyed the process of tempering my No. It went a bit like this. ‘That’s a great idea Bubba!’ ‘Sadly, Lapland is really far away.’ ‘And all our winter clothes are in the loft.’ My children are obsessed with the loft. ‘How about, in December, we meet up with Father Christmas in his grotto and you can eat a mince pie together?’ Before I’d even reached the end of my Christmas story, we were all smiling, the expected dinner plans had been forgotten, and I felt like a gentler version of my usual, manic self.

Consultant clinical psychologist, Emma Citron, who has an expertise in children, doesn’t obsesses about the number of Yes or No’s, she is more concerned with the way our answers are delivered. “Children need Yes and No’s. More importantly though, they need you to be thoughtful and selective in how you respond to their needs. We should always treat our children with decency and respect. What’s dangerous is when parents use their position to exert power for themselves. If you say No, you must give a reason, or your child will learn that they don’t have a voice and that they aren’t being listened to.”

This wasn’t dissimilar to what Bea Marshall had told me a few days earlier. Justify. Justify. Justify. “If you parent respectfully and talk decisions through” continued Citron, “then you will raise children who are emotionally intelligent.”

Reading between the lines, I reckon the more emotionally intelligent your children become, the easier they are to parent and perhaps, even, the fewer arguments you’ll have to endure when they become teenagers. Having been an argumentative teenager myself, anything that reduces the risk of that repeating itself is worth having a crack at.

My Yes Parenting experiment is an ongoing tale. I cannot lie; there are still No’s. I am a very tired human being whose brain function resides around the zero mark. Having said that, I feel a bit lighter these days. I feel that I have a bit more time to listen, a bit more time to think – and I don’t just shoot from the hip because I’m feeling lazy. Having said that, I haven’t succumbed to the chocolate buttons and Peppa Pig either.