Wants vs. Needs: What Kids (and Parents) Often Mix Up

Friends, you've been fans of Heidemarie Brosche for a long time now, and she has teamed up with Anja Küpper on a book, “Wieso denn plötzlich Nein?” (“Why Suddenly No?”), to help kids and parents see the difference between a want and a need. Anja is a certified special education teacher, author, consultant, and trainer for educators and parents, and it matters to her that we all understand the key difference…

Want or Need? That's the Question When You're Raising Kids

“Needs-based parenting is a surefire path to family chaos.” I hear that sentence, or something like it, far too often. From parents, grandparents, teachers, and childcare providers. But it's not science-based, needs-oriented parenting that causes the problems. Quite the opposite: it's the foundation for healthy child development.

Unfortunately, Instagram and the like are full of half-truths, myths, and, in some cases, hair-raising nonsense about what needs-based parenting supposedly is. And when parents follow that stuff, things can get wild. As a consultant and trainer for parents and professionals, I keep running into the same four top myths about needs-based parenting:

1: Needs-based parenting produces spoiled tyrants.

Nope, not true. Here's what you have to understand: meeting needs isn't a nice-to-have. Needs are essential. In other words, if children's basic needs aren't met, their healthy development is at risk. So what are these needs everyone keeps talking about?

We distinguish between physical and emotional needs. Physical needs include things like sleep, rest and quiet, food, physical closeness, movement, and protection from heat and cold. The emotional needs get a little more complicated.

They're about attachment, meaning connection and belonging, about comfort and security, trust and safety. They're about guidance and stability, integrity and boundaries, control and being responded to. They're about a child's self-worth: dignity, respect, appreciation, and being seen, along with understanding, acceptance, and tolerance.

They're about creativity, play, fun, and inspiration. And they're about autonomy. Freedom, self-determination, and individuality, taking part and having a say, discovering the world and themselves, and feeling capable. So meeting needs has nothing to do with spoiling. It simply builds the stable foundation for healthy development.

2: You're supposed to give kids everything they want.

Nope, also wrong. Needs-based parenting is about, as the name says, meeting needs (see above). Wants were never part of the deal. Put another way: needs are essential, wants are interchangeable. But behind every want is a need the child is trying to meet. Our job as parents and professionals is to figure out which one.

If a child absolutely insists on wearing one particular T-shirt, the need behind it might be security, self-determination and individuality, control, or belonging (if that shirt happens to be “in” right now). The T-shirt is just a means to an end, nothing more and nothing less.

In the picture book “Wieso denn plötzlich Nein?”, which Heidemarie Brosche and I just published with the German publisher mvg, Erdi the meerkat desperately wants another ice cream. Erdi's mom says NO to the ice cream, but YES to the needs she senses behind the request: after an exhausting day of everyone else calling the shots, Erdi needs a moment of calm and security, close to his or her family.

For Erdi, that feeling is tied to eating ice cream together at the table. Erdi's mom gets it and gives Erdi what he or she needs: peace and enjoyment in the middle of the family… but with watermelon instead of a third ice cream. So it's about looking behind the want, weighing things, and finding compromises.

And it's about saying no once in a while, when granting the wish would be harmful or just isn't doable. Or when, after weighing it all, parents put their own needs first (yes, that's allowed too, and hugely important when it comes to taking care of yourself).

Even if the mood tanks at first, even if your child screams and rages, that's the only way a child learns that all people, parents included, have needs. It's also the only way to learn to handle frustration, respect other people's boundaries, and compromise.

3: It's always only about the kids' needs.

Nope, wrong for the third time. Like I said, needs-based parenting only works when the needs of everyone in the system (family, daycare group, and so on) are seen and taken into account. That means the grown-ups' needs too! The different needs have to be weighed against each other again and again and reprioritized each time. Which need matters more right now? Which one is so urgent it has to be met and can't wait?

Here's an example. Say I've been sitting at my computer for a long time and have an urgent need to move. I've just started doing a few stretches when my daughter comes into the room in tears. Of course my need to move suddenly isn't so important anymore, and I put my daughter's need for comfort first. My movement break can wait.

Another example: my daughter doesn't want to go to Grandma and Grandpa's because she'd rather keep playing with her knight's castle. But I have a consulting appointment that I can't and don't want to cancel. In that moment, I put my work ahead of my daughter's need for self-determination. Together we think about what other game might be fun at Grandma and Grandpa's, and then she gets to go back to the castle later in the afternoon.

So I should always ask myself: Who can or has to step back here right now? Which needs can't be met at the moment and therefore have to wait? Maybe we can even find a compromise?

4: The goal is to spare kids negative emotions, so needs-based parenting means no more setting limits.

Nope, dangerously wrong! Our problem is our own guilty conscience and the overwhelm our kids' intense feelings set off in us. So we try to avoid the emotional outbursts that can come with unmet wishes, and as a result we often don't act like ourselves.

We're not doing anyone a favor this way, not ourselves and not our kids. We spend our lives in anticipatory dread, and in all the self-sacrifice and the need to keep the peace, we get closer and closer to our own limits. And we deny our kids the security that comes from caring clarity, from the feeling that the adults know exactly what they're doing.

We parents have to give our kids direction and hold them steady with a stable framework. When we say yes just to avoid negative feelings, we do exactly the opposite! We take away our kids' chance to get to know all their emotions and learn to deal with them, which is one of the most important tasks in a person's life.

So the problem isn't needs-based parenting. It's that far too often we buy something with a needs-based parenting label on the front and none of the real thing inside. And that we don't understand that needs-based parenting, properly understood, is a win. For everyone, parents included.