"No, you can't have the chocolate peanut butter cup. It's not for you."

I look up and tune into a conversation between my wife, who made the mistake of buying something for herself from the beach candy store earlier that day, and our 4-year-old hostage-negotiator-in-training daughter.

“Please??”

"Honey, I picked this for myself. You, if I recall correctly, asked for a lollipop."

"But I didn't know they had that."

Feigning ignorance won’t work here. We’ve been to this candy store a thousand times.

"Well, that's because you weren't there. You wanted to stay at the beach house and watch TV while Dad and I went into town. Remember?"

Daughter goes quiet for a moment, recalculating.

"…Yes. But I actually did want to go!"

Historical revisionism. Bold, with two witnesses in the room.

"No. You stayed and watched Wizard of Oz. You made your choice.”

A teaching moment; life is about tradeoffs.

"You don’t want to share it with me?"

Pathos. Well played.

"This is what I chose, for myself, to enjoy."

"It's not nice to not share."

Appeal to fairness. Another classic.

"It's neither nice nor not nice. It's just how it is."

My daughter takes a turn here I never would’ve expected. 

"But you don't even really like chocolate. Me and Dad like chocolate. You don't even like it, I'm pretty sure."

Red herring.

"I do in fact like chocolate. That's why I chose it."

It's like watching an eel try to get a fish out of a coral reef. Constantly pursuing a new angle, a new attack vector. 

"You're a mean mommy. A stinky mommy."

Ad hominem. That is not going to play well.

"You know what? Fine. You can have the chocolate. The whole thing. But it makes me very sad that you won't listen to me and let me enjoy the treat I chose for myself, even after we got you multiple lollipops and you got to watch a full movie on a sunny day. Very sad."

Silence.

"…I don't think… I don't think I want the chocolate, mommy."

After all the kids were down, my wife finally unwrapped her hand-crafted, sea-salted chocolate peanut butter cup. She took one bite.

"This is too savory."

Didn't finish it. Threw it away. A good reminder that the real ones don’t care about the prize—they do it for the love of the game.

Thanks for reading! Hope you laughed. See you next time.

-Will

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).