My daughter is six now, but she has yet to lose her first tooth.
She has a bottom-front tooth that is ready to break out of its rusty cage and run. My wife wants to pull it out. I would pull it out if called upon.
But our daughter is scared.
And so the afternoon was spent deploying various methods of persuasion:
- You’ll get cash (positive benefit)
- You won’t feel any pain (absence of a potentially bad effect)
- Your cousin did it (social proof!)
- You’ve never lost your teeth before. We have. You’ll be fine (invoking authority)
The truth? She likes the attention. The longer she keeps the tooth, the longer she can get her mama to look at it and play with it.
For my daughter, that’s the biggest benefit of all. We had a vague sense of this, but we got another lesson on it this afternoon.
Learning Together 