The Atlantic

How a Negotiation Expert Would Bargain With a Kid

Some tactical suggestions for managing volatile, sometimes nonsensical negotiation partners
Source: LightField Studios / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

One common feature of negotiations is that each party has the ability to walk away. Don’t like the offer the car salesperson is making you? Drive another five minutes to the next dealership. Don’t like the terms a business partner presents you with? Get in touch with another supplier.

But every day many people find themselves sitting across the table from a negotiation partner they can’t abandon or replace: their kids.

How might parents manage these often fraught, exasperating conversations in which their counterpart, lacking self-awareness, sometimes seems to think it strategic to ? I posed this question to Michael Wheeler, who has been teaching the principles of negotiation at Harvard Business

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic4 min read
Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was
The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
The Americans Who Need Chaos
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why peop
The Atlantic4 min read
KitchenAid Did It Right 87 Years Ago
My KitchenAid stand mixer is older than I am. My dad bought the white-enameled machine 35 years ago, during a brief first marriage. The bits of batter crusted into its cracks could be from the pasta I made yesterday or from the bread he made then. I

Related Books & Audiobooks