Here is a major reality of parenting: the consent of our strong-willed dependent creatures (whether children or, in the case of my friend, goats) is a thing that we cannot always predict and plan for.
For example, some days my four-year-old is perfectly cooperative with the process of leaving daycare, getting in the car, and getting buckled in her seat, so that we have plenty of time to get to the school bus stop on time to pick up her sisters. Other days, not so much. I have learned to leave extra time just in case, especially during phases when she’s already prone to fussiness. I can’t count on having her consent to cooperate with what I want her to do.
Consent may not always be the most applicable word here: it may be more a matter of capacity.
This is especially the case for kids are neurodivergent (like mine), because they have more needs and struggles that affect their nervous system capacity at any given time than neurotypical kids. If their nervous system is already maxed out from noise, uncomfortable clothes, and being around people, asking them to tolerate a tightly buckled seatbelt right now can be the straw that breaks the dam of meltdown restraint.
So, it’s a struggle to maintain the school/work schedule when we can’t predict their level of capacity and/or consent. This is (one reason) why we are usually late in the mornings!
(Sidenote: I think this dynamic also applies to internal functioning, within one’s own system of body and mind, especially for neurodivergent people: when we’re scheduling plans, we cannot predict how we will feel--and therefore what our capacity will be--on that future day.)
I hear people from older eras of parenting say, “You’re the parent! Your child should obey you! It’s your fault if you haven’t trained them to just perfectly obey you!”
No: that authoritarian model is outdated and harmful. It’s not a developmentally appropriate way to relate to a young child. I prefer the research-supported model of secure attachment (see my recent post about the book Raising Securely Attached Kids by Eli Harwood).
In short: I will not railroad over my children’s consent and capacity.
I want to operate by cooperation, mutual respect, and mindfulness. That means that everyone’s needs matter. It means my kids grow up knowing that their needs and feelings always matter.
It doesn’t mean they always get everything they want--but they do get support, validation, and attunement when things don’t go their way.
If (as my husband would claim) I sometimes err on the side of their feeling like their needs and feelings matter too much (a.k.a. “spoiled” or “entitled”), at this point, that’s okay with me (though I am doing my best to keep holding appropriate limits, boundaries, etc., and I do believe they need to have a lot of practice with frustration and dissatisfaction while in an otherwise supportive environment).
The world will do the rest of showing them ways in which their feelings and needs are not ultimately important to the universe. They will have some suffering.
If their home--and their mom--is a safe place for their needs and feelings to matter, that will at least give them the internal framework for knowing how they feel and what they need (in a way that I very much did not get).
They will learn to recognize and respect their own consent and capacity, as I am still trying to learn within myself.