My kids got new water bottles and were at the table having a rare treat of red juice. While they can normally carry their water bottles freely around the house, I told them while they had red juice in them, and were inside, they needed to stay at the table.
Several times, they both got up and started to wander off with the water bottles, just as a force of habit, and I reminded them each time that they were free to go but the bottle needed to stay at the table waiting for them to get back.
My daughter went off and found her grandpa. I could hear her asking “Papaw, I got a new water bottle. Do you want to see it?” Of course, he said yes.
She came running back in to get the water bottle from the table, made eye contact with me and insisted that she HAD to take it away from the table because Papaw wanted to see it. (She didn’t actually care if he saw it or not; she wanted to move her body, not sit down, and she wanted to take the juice with her.)
This is often the kind of series of events that adults mean when they are thinking of children being manipulative. The child wants something and they find a clever way to get that need met: finding a loophole, doing it on “behalf” of someone else, or finding some other way to bend, break, or twist what felt like “the rules”.
If you use a very basic definition of the word “manipulate” — like, in the way that you could say “I manipulated the vending machine and got my drink out of it” — then sure, it could be said that children are manipulative. But that would be a slightly clunky way to describe it, given the fact that “manipulate” actually has negative connotations, as if the child is doing something sneaky or “bad” by pushing the buttons they think will lead to getting the thing they want.
Everybody in the world wants to get the things we want. And children are continually subject to a lot of things that feel completely arbitrary. The rules of this world they live in are so strange.
From a kid point of view: adults can get whatever they want at a store, but kids can’t, because the adults aren’t willing to stoop to the very mild inconvenience of tapping one piece of plastic with another piece of plastic in order that they might legally obtain whatever the kids want.
From a kid point of view: sometimes it’s allowed to talk, and sometimes it’s not allowed to talk, and adults are the ones who usually get to decide, and no matter if you can or can’t talk, there’s some strings of sounds that if you make them with your mouth will get people mad at you, and ANY string of sounds if you make it enough times in rapid succession will get people annoyed at you, and there are certain sounds you have to make if you want anybody to give you anything without lecturing you about it.
From a kid point of view: some things that taste delicious can be eaten in vast quantities frequently. Other things that taste delicious can only be eaten in small amounts. Still others are only for special days or special occasions. Sometimes, starting to act as if you want the delicious things is enough to freak the adults out and make them want to give you fewer delicious things.
Navigating this world of bizarre, arbitrary, semi-comprehensible, semi-predictable rules all of the time, kids learn all kinds of ways to cope. And some of those ways involve figuring out how to get their need met some other way, trial and erroring it, and seeing if the adults are annoyed; and if not, voila, success!
But if the adults ARE annoyed, suddenly they’re BIG annoyed, because this was like, evil manipulation?
We can all think of examples of adults exploiting loopholes to get away with crime, or manipulate people on a grand scale, and I think that’s why it scares adults. They don’t want their child to act like that. But their child isn’t able to predict that what they’re doing is sneaky or potentially hurtful or underhanded. They’re just doing their best to get their need met. They need an adult who can look past the exact specifics of their “behavior” and say: I see you’re trying to … let’s try X instead because that meets both your needs and mine.
I reminded my daughter that the other option was if she needed to run around with her red juice, she could take it outside. I explained my reasoning, that I didn’t want red to spill on the floor inside but that if it spilled in the grass it didn’t matter. We all (Papaw included) went outside to play.
