Academic

Imagine three-year-old Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld standing outside in twenty-degree wind chill weather in skirt and tights because she won?t do what her mother says.   What do you see?  I see a brilliant negotiator. 

I tell my students that negotiation is everywhere.  This aphorism may be trite, but its truth is manifestly evident in Amy Chua?s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  Reading the book, I repeatedly found myself analyzing Professor Chua?s interaction with her daughters from a negotiation perspective.

Perhaps one of the most powerful concepts that has emerged from writing on negotiation in the last thirty or so years is that of the BATNA ? the best alternative to a negotiated agreement.  The idea of a BATNA is that you need to think carefully about what will happen if you fail to reach a negotiated agreement.  If your negotiated deal isn?t better than your BATNA, forget it.  For lawyers, the BATNA for negotiating a settlement is nice and easy, at least in theory:  if negotiation fails, you?ll go to court.  So if your expected value at trial is better than the agreement on the table, reject it.  If your expected value is worse, take it.  Strong BATNAs provide power at the negotiation table.   

The BATNA calculation, as any parent who?s ever had a child on the verge of a meltdown in the supermarket checkout line knows, is not so easy in parenting.  Nonetheless, it works pretty much the same way that I've described above.  What are the consequences that will ensue from not reaching some kind of agreement with your child?  Will there be a tantrum of immense proportions?  Will the child learn an important life lesson?  Will an important family event be cancelled?  It?s a calculation that parents often perform in a split second; sometimes, the miscalculations are the most edifying.  (Expected value calculation, after all, is just a number that captures a combination of outcomes and probabilities.  And expected value calculations might not look so good stacked up next to the reality of a child screaming bloody murder for 20 blocks as strangers on the sidewalk give you that beady, suspicious stare.  Not that that?s ever happened to me, of course.)  

So when Amy Chua took Lulu outside in the freezing cold, she was trying to say, ?Lulu, your best alternative to a negotiated agreement here is not looking that good.  I know you don?t really want to freeze, and so I think the terms I?m offering are pretty good in comparison.?  And, lo and behold, Lulu did something amazing ? something that marks a really great negotiator.  She turned a weakness into strength.  She saw through the ?your BATNA is to stay out here freezing? gambit to think about what her mother?s BATNA was.  In common parlance, we would say that Lulu "called her bluff."  I almost feel bad for Professor Chua:  it?s a rookie negotiation error.  And indeed, as Professor Chua explains quite clearly, all of the sudden her own BATNA wasn?t looking too good.  She saw the future, and it involved some ugly interactions with child services.  Lulu has the last laugh here, coming inside to a nice warm bath and hot cocoa. 

Sure, you might be thinking, but we?re talking about a child here.  Well, exactly.  A great point about negotiation is that power dynamics can be tremendously fluid, and sometimes they?re defined in ways we wouldn?t predict.  They can be especially interesting when the parties, like children, act in unexpected ways.  Who has more power, Lulu or her mother?  On paper, Chua holds the cards.  She runs the house:  she can threaten to burn the stuffed animals, prevent trips to the bathroom, and so on, and so on.  But Lulu has power too.  She can force her mother to either actually carry out her wild threats or abandon them, showing that they were empty threats all along.  Perhaps more powerfully, she can mortify her mother and demonstrate that their relationship hangs in the balance.   She uses a child?s unpredictability to her great advantage.  Lulu the negotiator makes it clear that Chua?s BATNA is a bummer:  have a really bad relationship with your child, not just now but maybe later, not to mention having that relationship play out in public.

Certainly, it may be peculiarly Western to believe that you need to negotiate with your child.  Indeed, Chua mentions explicitly at one point in the book that Chinese parents view children as extensions of themselves.  But children are people, and I?d argue that watching Lulu negotiate is a good reminder that it?s awfully useful to take children seriously as human beings.  Lulu is a terrific negotiator.  I?d like to have her come and speak to my students.