7-Year-Old Calmly Negotiates Her Own Bedtime, Because Kids Are Savage
Get this kid in law school, stat
Negotiating with kids can be a little like negotiating with terrorists. If you do it once, you’ve opened the door to all kinds of kid demands, and many of them just aren’t worth negotiating over. There’s no room for negotiation when it comes to getting to school on time, doing homework and getting chores done, after all.
But that doesn’t mean that nothing can be negotiated with kids. Seven-year-old Evelyn Underwood’s parents learned that when their daughter surprised them with bargaining skills that put some adults to shame.
Evelyn’s parents, who have been identified by PopSugar as Ty and Mary Underwood, posted a photo to Reddit showing the hilarious note Evelyn wrote to them when she decided she wanted to negotiate a later bedtime.
For those who have trouble deciphering Evelyn’s handwriting, her dad translated it for us all.
I mean, to my admittedly untrained eyes, Evelyn just made a rock solid argument. And the people of Reddit agreed.
And then there’s this:
Clearly Evelyn is going places. Her dad told Pop Sugar that this was just the latest tactic in a months-long campaign for a later bedtime.
“Evelyn has been asking for a later bedtime for months. Mary and I finally shut down the conversation when she could not give us a good reason why we should extend it,” he said. “After putting our foot down about [bedtime] and telling her she will be sent to bed early the next time she asks, I guess she decided to work around the system.”
And part of that involved “serving” her parents with the negotiation letter with the most professional and serious delivery.
“Right before bed one night last week, she handed her letter over in a sealed envelope and told Mary that if we wanted to ‘discuss the contents of this letter’ that she would be available anytime,” Underwood added. “We both read it and after deciphering it (she has been working on her handwriting), we laughed about it for a good few minutes.”
The first step on the road to a later bedtime for Evelyn was a little bit of a test.
“We didn’t talk to her about it for a few days and she didn’t bring it up once. We decided that type of cleverness and assertive behavior should be rewarded and we opened the door to negotiations,” Underwood said. “She now gets to stay up until 8:30 p.m. instead of 8 p.m., but that time can only be spent reading in bed and it’s a provisional bedtime,” he said, adding that, “If she is late getting ready for school in the mornings since she makes her own lunches, then the bedtime reverts back to 8.”
This isn’t even the first time Evelyn has showed the kind of conviction that’s rare, even in adults.
“When she was 3, we told her that if she wouldn’t eat her veggies with dinner, then she could be done and go to bed for the rest of the night,” Underwood said. “She would calmly get up, change into pajamas, brush her teeth, and climb into bed three hours early and stare at the ceiling until it got dark and only then fall asleep. It’s hard to be upset at that type of conviction.”
If this isn’t more proof that the kids are going to take over the world someday (and hopefully soon), I don’t know what is.
