BUSTING pester power
PESTERING is a welldocumented superpower among the miniature set, but many parents experienced a surprise reprieve during coronavirus restrictions.
A welcome break in a daily battle, the lockdown led to a revelation around lollies and other demands: kept out of supermarkets and away from schoolmates, a lot of kids simply asked for less.
Having been spared the most popular pester points for a sustained period, mums and dads are now looking to build on the new household peace.
Mother of two Andreza Slater was caught off-guard when her 9-yearold son Kahu — a pester power Jedi — stopped nagging during lockdown.
Pre-COVID-19, Kahu’s main pester point revolved around play dates with his Year 4 peers, but it only took a single conversation for the message to get through and his behaviour to change. Other parents in their circle reported the same.
“Pestering is definitely not something that Kahu’s outgrown, however, during lockdown he wasn’t asking to go out,” Ms Slater said.
“He wasn’t stressed out. It was quite easy to navigate his desires.
“Now that he’s back at school, we’re back at it. Back at the whole thing: ‘I need this, I need that, I want this, I want that’.
“When we were home and he didn’t really have an option to get out, he was dealing with what he had and it was really surprising.”
Dr Bill Page, a research fellow at the University of South Australia, researches the way marketing and childhood come together to produce certain behaviours.
He said the nature of “the ask” changed over time as children developed more sophisticated knowledge about parental weak spots.
The pandemic presented a unique set of protocols outside traditional battlegrounds, perhaps because children saw parents deprived of friends, outings and favourite things, too. “What we see in the research over 20 years-plus is that as children get older, they do make less requests, but the requests they do make are more successful,” Dr Page said.
“There is absolutely a learning effect that happens. As they get older, they get more canny. They’ll know not only how to ask, but what to ask for.”
Dr Page was intrigued to learn Kahu and his friends modified habitual behaviour as soon as the lockdown began, suggesting they had reached a pivotal juncture in their ability to grasp changing circumstances. They understood the futility of pursuing requests that had no possibility of being granted.
“That’s kind of amazing that the learning happened so quickly. There’s a whole bunch of different developmental things that come together at about age seven or eight that allow them to have a lot better perspective,” he said.
Dr Page said now children were accustomed to staying out of the supermarket, keeping it that way might help parents significantly reduce their children’s access to undesirable edibles, one of the most common and tedious pester points.
Outside the junk aisle, keeping the gains alive remained a tough prospect with a toddler in tow. Toddlers are indiscriminate and tireless when it comes to exercising pester power.
“Toddlers will just ask for everything. Ask, ask, ask, ask, and they get told ‘no’ all the time and it doesn’t matter, they just keep asking,” Dr Page said.
Indeed, while Ms Slater homeschooled Kahu, his nearly threeyear-old sister Naia developed an unfortunate taste for TV.
“That brought guilt, and it also brought this situation where she wakes up in the morning and the first thing she says is, ‘I want a little bit of Wiggles’,” Ms Slater said.
“This was a bad habit that she acquired in isolation. She wouldn’t just say, ‘Okay, I’ll play with my puzzle while you sit there for two hours helping my brother.’ It doesn’t work like that.”