The End-Around: Identifying Alternative Solutions

Here’s something 99.98% of parents can relate to: my daughter loves her iPad. Well, technically it’s my iPad, but I finally conceded and bought myself a MacBook instead. Thanks, kid!

Nora loves her tablet nearly as much as she loves milk. In fact, she invented her own word to request her two favorite things in the morning, “Milkandtablet, Mama?”

The great thing about your child loving something is that is gives you leverage.

At Nora’s three-year check-up, the pediatrician informed me she should be taking a daily Vitamin D supplement. She told me they came in gummies, so I should have no problem getting my daughter to take them. We both underestimated the degree of my child’s stubbornness.

For some inexplicable reason, Nora refused to try the gummy vitamins. She wouldn’t even try one vitamin disguised as a piece of candy. I was baffled.

If she had tried one and not liked it, my husband and I would have just let it go. But we wanted to prove a point. She had to at least try it. She refused repeatedly, so we pulled out the big guns.

We weren’t sure who would suffer more, her or us, when we told her no more tablet until she tried a gummy. We braced ourselves for the tantrum of a lifetime. But instead of flipping her lid, she responded with an “ok” and a shrug of her shoulders. While we were shocked, we knew she wouldn’t hold out long. She couldn’t. She did.

No tablet with her milk in the morning or at bedtime. Her daily ritual was abandoned with zero perceptible regret. Well, at least, none from her. No amount of convincing would make her try the stupid gummy vitamin. After a weeklong standoff, I did what any other mom would do: bought vitamin D drops, snuck them into her milk and gave her back the damned iPad.

It’s called an end-around: a solution to a problem that avoids the problem rather than dealing with it directly. At work, both with clients and among different departments, this type of scenario happens more often than we’d like to admit.

You try to do what you think is best and someone else won’t even consider it as an option. You can’t come to an agreement on an issue, but you still need to get the job done.

Being an effective problem-solver means trying different methods to achieve the intended result. Even if it means you need to sneak vitamins into your child’s drink.