The power of ‘no’: Why it is healthy and normal for toddlers to say ‘no’ all the time

When our daughter began to understand the meaning of the word ‘no’, she would use it all the time.

She’d exclaim ‘no!’ in response to a question or statement, vigorously shake her head, or push things away she was offered. She often did so with great joy. And for a while she did so to absolutely everything she was offered, asked, or told – even things she really liked.

Sometimes I did find it frustrating.

This obsession with ‘no’ can be pretty inconvenient.

But I believe that it is an important and healthy part of development.

We tend to think of boundaries as something we set for our children. We tell them what they can and can’t do.

But boundaries are really something each person sets for themselves.

Or, put differently, each person naturally has a line (metaphorically speaking) around their physical space, their emotions, and their needs. And when this line is crossed, when, for example, someone invades their physical space more than they feel comfortable with, then they respond in ways that protect their boundary.

This is the function of healthy, empowering anger. It arises in response to a boundary violation, and once the boundary has been protected the anger usually subsides.

All mammals have evolved to have a gut intuition telling them if and when their boundaries are crossed and the accompanying rise in anger motivates them to defend their boundary, and thus to defend themselves.

And for humans, the ability to protect their boundaries develops slowly in childhood.

Humans are born with a need for safety and autonomy. Meeting both needs is necessary to survive.

Children can’t keep themselves safe; they need to stay close to caregivers to stay alive. Over our evolutionary history, those children left alone at night, for example, would have been easy prey for a lion or cheetah, or frozen to death. Hence, children are born with a strong motivation to attach to their parents or caregivers. This is what has ensured their survival over our evolutionary history.

Like other mammals, humans are also born with a need for autonomy. Humans need to be able to live their lives autonomously, to listen to their own gut, to make choices for themselves, and to have control over their own lives. Any animal (including humans) living in the “wild” would not be able to survive long if they didn’t have this autonomy.

Just imagine a deer not being able to listen to its own gut feeling, who is controlled by another deer that dictates if and when it can run away when grazing. It isn’t hard to see how this deer would be much more likely to be eaten by a predator than deer that can listen to their own gut and freely decide.

Even babies have a need for autonomy. For example, putting mittens on their tiny hands – in the well-intentioned attempt to prevent them from scratching themselves – prevents them from exploring their bodies and their environment with their hands, and undermines their autonomy in a small way.

Of course, for babies who are utterly dependent on their caretakers to survive, the need for safety is much more prevalent than the need for autonomy.

But this balance slowly begins to shift as babies grow and become more capable. In toddlerhood, children 1) become more and more capable to do things on their own and 2) come to understand more and more that they are a person that is separate from others.

And so these 2 aspects of development make the need for autonomy (while still an inferior need relative to the need for safety), more prevalent.

As part of this need, children begin to sense, explore, and express their own boundaries.  

They experiment with saying ‘no’ or otherwise protecting their boundaries and do so with great joy, even when the thing they say ‘no’ to isn’t necessarily something they don’t want.

In my opinion, this likely is a form of play.

And so allowing them to experiment with setting boundaries for themselves, to say ‘no’, and to express opinions or preferences counter to the ones we are offering (simply for the fact that they are counter to ours) is important for children to satisfy their need for autonomy, to be able to listen to their own gut and intuition, and to learn to stand up for themselves.

When we instead view this behavior as oppositional, as testing us, and feel the need to disregard, discount or discourage it, we chip away at this autonomy bit by bit.

And over time, children learn to ignore their own gut feelings, to either go along with the things they are pressured into or to rebel against them even if they like the thing they are pressured to do.  

In our modern society, lacking autonomy doesn’t necessarily lead directly to death as it does when roaming the tundra.

But it certainly leads to other unhealthy outcomes.

When lacking autonomy in this way, children, over the course of their lives, may become unable to tell when they are hungry and eat past that point or simply eat foods their body doesn’t want, they may be unable to refuse sexual advances they feel uncomfortable with, they may become unable to stand up to a boss who treats them poorly.

Whatever the particular downstream consequences may be, they essentially are the result of a disconnect from the self.

If we look at our society today, we can see that this is true of most adults (myself included). We think it is normal to struggle with eating too much, addictions, feeling helpless or angry, or otherwise being unable to listen to and trust one’s own intuition and feeling disconnected.

But most of us were raised, in one way or another, such that our ‘no’ was not welcome.

When we look at small-band hunter gather groups (which is the way we have lived for most of our evolutionary history as humans), we can see something remarkable that has been found across ALL groups ever studied, regardless of whether they lived in the Arctic Circle or the Kalahari Desert:

They believe that children deserve complete autonomy over their lives.

They believe it is unacceptable to tell anybody, even a toddler, what to do (or not to do).

This doesn’t make them permissive or negligent. On the contrary! They also see children as inherently good, as deserving of love and compassion. And so they form an invisible safety net around them. When a toddler toddles off, someone is always close by and moves in closer as the toddler gets closer to something that is potentially dangerous. And they swoop in when needed. But they don’t lecture or scold the toddler.

And here is another fact about these groups: They also have the best behaved, kindest, most helpful children. As Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived with the Ju/wasi in the Kalahari Desert, put it in her fascinating book ‘The old way’: “Free from frustration or anxiety, sunny and cooperative […], the Ju/wa children were every parent’s dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more intelligent, more likeable, more confident children.”

Because parents work with these children’s evolved nature to teach them how to be a cooperative member, drawing on children’s natural desire to cooperate.

So in these societies, children have complete autonomy.

And while I am not aware of any data on this, I doubt that toddlers there use the word ‘no’ as much. Because there is nothing to say ‘no’ to when no one tries to force you to do or stop doing something.

And more to the point of this article, they also don’t struggle with setting boundaries for themselves when they are adults, or with feelings of helplessness, or with constant anger.  

And so I think it is important that we try to allow our children as much as possible to have autonomy over their own lives, their own bodies. 

And to respect their ‘no’.

If we can see it as part of healthy development, we can perhaps take it with a sense of humor.

And try to take their perspective: After all, we don’t like it either when our ‘no’ gets ignored.

I try my best to live this way more and more every day.

And I still fail. I often find myself trying to impose my will on my daughter.

I also know that in our society, it is sometimes necessary to impose our will. But the fact that our society is organized in a way that isn’t always conducive to a healthy development of our children, is not their fault (nor is it parents’ fault!).

And so I try to do right by my daughter as best I can. And learn from my mistakes.

So that when she is an adult, she is connected to herself, so that she can listen to her intuition and has the power to say ‘no’.