There's a Korean saying — 우는 아이 떡 하나 더 준다 — "the kid who cries gets one more rice cake." Same energy as our "squeaky wheel gets the grease." Not at our house. You can negotiate ("hey, can I have just a small bite of this?") all night long. You cannot yell your way to a different dinner. ...And the dad writing this is more tired than the kid throwing the plate.
7:14 PM. I set the plate down. Half a second later it's airborne.
"Not the dinner I wanted." That's the whole reason. Yelling, throwing, full meltdown mode. I'm pretty sure my face just says yep. here we go.
There's a Korean saying I keep coming back to: 우는 아이 떡 하나 더 준다 — the kid who cries gets one more rice cake. Same vibe as our "squeaky wheel gets the grease," I guess.
Not at our house. Hard pass on that one.
If the lesson he walks away with is "yell loud enough and dinner changes," we're cooked. Long-term cooked. So that lever doesn't move. Not once.
But — and this is the part I want to be clear about — the negotiation lever moves all night long. "Hey, this one's kinda gross to me, can I just have a little?" "Can we leave the sauce off?" Yes. Yes. Yes to all of that. Don't yell. Just talk. That's basically the whole house rule.
Think of it like a front desk. If you let people who scream cut the line, pretty soon everyone shows up screaming. So we don't move people up the line for screaming. But the desk is open. Pull a number, walk over normally, and we're listening.
I'll be honest — it's about half reasoning and half pure stubbornness on my part.
The reasoning part is a thing called intermittent reinforcement. In behavioral research, the reward that shows up only sometimes turns out to be the stickiest behavior pattern of all¹. If one out of ten meltdowns ever works, the kid is now permanently designing his life around finding that one. ...Look, I know how this sounds. Sitting at the kitchen table thinking in reinforcement schedules — that's just the indie-dev brain leaking in. Understanding how people get into a behavior makes my apps better. The parenting use is kind of a side effect.
And then — recently we added oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) on top of all this, which honestly puts the reasoning part out to pasture. I think I've written this somewhere before: my kid isn't reacting to what gets said anymore. He's reacting to who said it. Same exact words from two different people — different planets.
So I mostly try not to say things out loud. I let the app say them. Half the reason the todo apps exist in this house is so I don't have to be the voice in the room. ...Dinner, though. Dinner I can't outsource to a notification. The wrong-looking thing on the plate is not a problem an alarm can solve.
At night, after bedtime, I read ADHD parenting blogs. I read the stories and I get it. I get it, I get it. But the response in my head doesn't land on yeah, that's tough. There's no clean word for what it lands on. Tough doesn't reach. Slammed gets closer. Done gets closer.
Anyway.
The reason there are like ten of these little apps coming out of this house — that's just the trial-and-error wreckage from "what would actually click for this kid." Some clicked. Some never moved. But the ones that didn't work for him — if any of them work for some other family's kid, I'll take that. I want to believe none of it was wasted.
Honestly, I have no idea if any of this is the right way. The "no rewards for screaming" line is the one thing I haven't moved on. Everything else, I rethink most days.
...Anyway. Tomorrow's dinner is probably also going to fly.