My daughter’s vocabulary is astounding. She can say dozens, if not hundreds of words. Her breadth of words is so impressive that she’ll often say words I’ve never heard of. Sometimes I’ll have to ask her to use the word in a sentence to understand its meaning.
With such a large range of words, it’s surprising that she uses one word again and again.
Ninety-five percent of her dialogue consists of this one word. Unfortunately the word isn’t “daddy” or “mommy.” The word is “no” as in “no daddy” or “no mommy.”
At dinner recently, my wife and daughter recently had this exchange
“Do you want toast?”
“No toast.”
“Do you want yogurt?”
“No yo-yo.”
“Do you want milk?”
“No milk.”
“Do you want a daiquiri?”
“No dack-ri.”
Any question posed to my daughter is answered with “no” followed by the subject at hand. This no is often accompanied by furious hand waving or emphatic head shaking. Sometimes even giving my daughter a passing glance garners this negative response.
I’m an optimist so I’m not sure how I ended up with a sippy-cup-half-empty daughter. Her negative opinion will lead to a promising career as a professional critic or that co-worker who always shuts down ideas without offering any. If only she was in the meetings where they keep renewing One Tree Hill. “No One Tree Hill.”
There’s no arguing with her no. It’s like discussing politics with someone who watches (choose your own antithetical political pop culture reference). So we’ll often just disregard her unwavering opinion. She fails to backup her arguments.
Remember in math class when they said show your work? Saying “no ‘sagna” and then taking a bite of lasagna invalidates your argument. And no matter how fiercely you debate the “no bed” talking point, mommy and daddy will still require bedtime.
My wife and I like to think it’s just a phase. It’s her no phase, her burgeoning independence expressing itself succinctly. She’s not really a tiny contrarian curmudgeon. She’ll eventually learn to construct proper sentences and develop follow-up arguments.
Unfortunately, I’ve read ahead in my toddler owner’s manual. I know that the only argument to follow “no” is the even more frustrating, never-ending, slow-death of “why?”
As in “why me?”
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