Negotiation starts much earlier than children realise.
A child asking for five more minutes of screen time is negotiating. Two siblings deciding who gets the first turn with a new toy are negotiating. Even choosing which game to play with a friend can become a negotiation when they want different things.
Learning how to teach negotiation skills to children is really about helping them communicate what they want, understand another person’s point of view, and work towards an agreement.
What Are Negotiation Skills for Children?
Negotiation skills are the ability to communicate what you want, listen to another person’s perspective, consider different options, and work towards an agreement.
That might sound like a fairly advanced skill for a child, but the building blocks are simple.
A child who says, “You can have the blue marker if I can use the red one afterwards,” is already practicing negotiation. So is a child who suggests taking turns with a favorite toy instead of continuing to argue over it.
The useful part isn’t simply reaching a deal. The child is learning to think beyond their own first preference.
They can practice:
- explaining what they want and why
- listening to another person’s reasons
- asking questions
- suggesting alternatives
- considering another person’s needs
- making compromises
- staying calm when the outcome isn’t what they expected
This is why negotiation is generally considered a soft skill. It relies on communication, listening, collaboration and interpersonal judgment. There are also specific techniques children can practise, such as making a proposal, considering alternatives and weighing trade-offs.
What do you want? What does the other person want? What could you both agree to?
That is already a useful foundation.
These are also the same building blocks children use when developing leadership skills and confidence, particularly when they need to express an idea, listen to another perspective, or make a decision.
Why Are Negotiation Skills Important for Children?
Teaching a child to negotiate gives them another way to handle disagreement besides arguing, giving up, or immediately asking an adult to decide.
Take a simple playdate. Your child wants to play football, but their friend wants to draw. Your child could insist on football and their friend could insist on drawing. They could ask an adult to settle it.
Or they could work through the disagreement.
Maybe they draw first and play football afterwards. Maybe they find a game that involves both activities. Maybe one child agrees to try the other person’s choice this time and they switch next time.
That small exchange involves several useful skills. The child has to explain their preference, listen to another person’s preference, consider an alternative and possibly change their original idea.
They also learn something important about compromise: a successful negotiation doesn’t always mean getting exactly what you wanted at the start.
The same thinking becomes useful in entrepreneurship. Business decisions often involve competing priorities, limited resources and different ideas about what should happen next.
5 Daily Situations to Train Negotiation Skills
The easiest place to start is with situations that already happen at home. It could be a disagreement over screen time, a shared toy, or a family plan.
Instead of solving every disagreement immediately, give your child a chance to suggest a solution. Ask questions, and step in when the situation genuinely requires an adult decision.
Here are five scenarios you can try.
1. The Screen-Time Negotiation
Imagine one child wants to watch a favourite programme while a sibling wants to play a game on the television. You can try ask each child to explain what they want.
Try asking:
- What do you want?
- Why do you want it?
- What does the other person want?
- Is there a way to do both?
- What could you agree to?
The sibling may have a reason too. Perhaps the game can wait. Perhaps the programme can be watched later. Perhaps they can find another activity.
The Programme on Negotiation at Harvard Law School discusses a similar distinction in its advice on teaching children to self-advocate. Looking at the interests behind a person’s position can reveal solutions that aren’t obvious.
2. The Sharing or Splitting Negotiation
It’s so easy to see two kids wanting the same toy, or maybe a snack. Before deciding how to divide it, ask them what they think would be fair.
They might suggest taking turns. They might divide the item. They might decide that one child gets first choice this time and the other gets first choice next time.
You can help by asking:
- What does the other person want?
- What would you be willing to accept?
- Is there another way to do this?
- What would feel fair to both of you?
This also creates a natural opening to talk about wants and needs. A child may really want the larger piece of cake without actually needing it.
Children are learning to consider another person’s preference and recognise that a workable solution may require compromise.
3. The Family Activity Negotiation
Family plans provide another useful opportunity in learning negotiation. During a family activity, maybe your child wants to go to the playground, but you need to finish an errand. And then there’s the sibling wanting to do something else.
You could simply announce the plan and move on. But if the situation allows it, ask your child to suggest an alternative.
“What do you think we should do?”
Your child might suggest going to the playground first and doing the errand afterwards. You might offer a shorter playground visit. Or maybe someone might do a different activity altogether.
This doesn’t mean your child gets to make every family decision. Parents still make the final call when safety, schedules or other practical limits are involved.
The practice comes from giving the child room to explain a preference, consider another person’s reason and adjust their proposal.
And sometimes the answer will still be no. That is part of negotiation too.
4. The “Convince Me” Negotiation
A lot of times your child asks for something and you aren’t convinced.Try to ask why they should do that/have that and let the child make a case.
You can follow up with:
- What’s your reason?
- What would you offer in return?
- What would make this fair?
- What if I still don’t agree?
- Is there another solution?
This teaches that negotiation involves reasoning, and repeating the same request until someone gives in isn’t negotiation.
Your child may still hear “no” at the end. But the child still had the chance to organise their thoughts and explain their reasoning.
And if their reasoning does change your mind, they learn something valuable too: a well-explained proposal can sometimes change a decision.
5. The Mini Business Negotiation
Money and business create an interesting setting for negotiation because choices involve trade-offs.
Imagine two children running a pretend snack stall. They have a fixed amount of pretend money. One child wants to spend more on packaging. The other thinks the money should go towards ingredients.
There isn’t one obvious answer.
They could split the budget. They could find cheaper packaging. They could sell fewer products. They could rethink the whole idea.
Now the children have to explain their priorities, listen to each other, and decide which trade-offs they are willing to make.
This is where negotiation connects naturally with entrepreneurship as they’re making a decision where choosing one option affects another.
That practical approach is also reflected in MoneyKids’ Entrepreneur Bootcamp, where children build a mini business from idea to pitch through games, role-play and simulation.
A pretend business gives children a low-stakes place to try out ideas, disagree, make proposals and change their minds. They can experience the give-and-take of a negotiation without real money being involved.
How Parents Can Help Children Negotiate
Teaching negotiation doesn’t mean letting children negotiate every rule.
Bedtime is bedtime. Safety rules are safety rules. And sometimes a parent has to make the decision because there isn’t time for a five-minute ping-pong conversation.
The right moments are the situations where there is room for discussion. That’s where parents can step back a little and let children practise working things out.
Let children try before stepping in
When two children disagree, it’s so easy to get up and decide who gets what. While this fixes the problem, it can’t cost us the opportunity to practice negotiation.
If the situation is safe, give them a chance to suggest a solution first.
You can stay nearby without becoming the referee.
Ask questions instead of giving the answer
A few well-chosen questions can help a child think through the disagreement without having the parent solve it for them.
Try:
- “What do you want?”
- “What does your sibling want?”
- “Why does that matter to you?”
- “What could you both agree to?”
- “What else could you try?”
Nudge the children to think about the problem from more than one angle.
Help them calm down before negotiating
Negotiation is difficult when everyone is already shouting.
The NDNA’s guidance on teaching negotiation to young children places emotional regulation alongside skills such as cooperation, problem-solving, compromise, and learning through play.
Taking a break isn’t the end of the negotiation. It can be what makes the conversation possible.
Model negotiation in daily conversations
Children also learn by watching adults handle disagreements.
That can be as simple as explaining why you changed a plan, acknowledging another person’s preference, or showing how you reached a compromise.
You don’t need to turn these moments into a lesson. Letting children hear the reasoning behind everyday decisions gives them examples of what negotiation sounds like.
Praise & appreciate the process
If your child suggests taking turns, listens without interrupting, or changes their proposal after hearing another person’s point of view, those behaviors are worth noticing.
They may not get the outcome they wanted.
That’s okay.
A child who learns to say, “Okay, what if we do it this way instead?” has already picked up a skill that will serve them far beyond the original disagreement.
3 Negotiation Games to Practice With Children
Once children understand the basic idea of negotiation, games can give them a chance to practise without the pressure of a real disagreement.
The advantage of a game is that you can change the rules, swap roles, and try the situation again. A child can make one proposal, see what happens, then try a different approach the next time.
1. Pick One, Trade One
Give your child two choices and let them decide how they want to trade.
For example, offer two toys, activities, or privileges and tell your child they can choose one. Then introduce another person who wants the same thing.
Now they have to work out an arrangement.
Could they take turns? Trade something else? Combine the activities? Give up one choice in exchange for another?
Keep the focus on the conversation rather than finding the “correct” answer.
2. The Pretend Marketplace
A pretend marketplace is a simple way to introduce negotiation alongside money concepts.
Give your child a few pretend products and pretend money. One child can act as the seller while another plays the customer.
The customer thinks the price is too high. The seller doesn’t want to lower it.
What happens next?
The children can make offers, explain their reasoning, suggest alternatives, or decide that they can’t reach an agreement.
No real money needs to change hands. The value is in giving children a situation where they have to communicate, listen, and make decisions.
You can also turn this into other fun money games at home, from pretend shopping to pricing challenges and family activities that get children thinking about how money works.
This can also introduce an early entrepreneurship concept that a price is more than a number and there is a reason behind a seller’s decision, and a buyer has their own priorities too.
3. The Family Decision Challenge
Give your child a pretend family decision with limited resources.
For example, imagine the family has a fixed number of points to spend on a weekend. The children can decide how those points should be allocated across activities.
One child wants to spend more on an outing. Another wants to save some points for food. Someone else wants to use them for a different activity.
Let them make their case. Then ask them to find a solution everyone can accept.
You can also bring the same idea into family game night with money board games and Monopoly alternatives, where children have to make decisions about spending, trading, and managing limited resources.
Games like these give children a low-stakes place to practise negotiation. They can make an offer, hear a counteroffer, change their proposal, and discover that different solutions can lead to different outcomes.
Is Negotiation a Skill, a Value, or Both?
Negotiation is generally classified as a soft skill because it depends on how a person communicates, listens, responds to others, and handles disagreement.
But most of the time, this one trips people up because negotiation sits at an odd intersection. It’s built on values, fairness, honesty, respect for the other person’s position, but it’s also a skill in the practical sense: something you get better at with repetition, feedback, and coaching.
A child can hold generous, fair-minded values and still be a poor negotiator, because they haven’t practiced turning those values into a concrete ask. And vice-versa can happen too.
Values set the boundaries of what a good negotiation looks like, no deception, no manipulation, respect for the other side, and skill is what lets a child actually operate inside those boundaries and get somewhere.
Communication works the same way, it’s the vehicle the skill travels in. You can’t negotiate well without communicating clearly, but communicating clearly doesn’t automatically make you a negotiator. One is the tool, the other is knowing what to build with it.
When Should You Start Teaching Children Negotiation?
There isn’t a specific age when negotiation suddenly becomes a skill worth teaching. Children can start practising it as soon as they can express preferences and take part in simple back-and-forth conversations.
The key is to match the situation to the child’s age and ability. Start with simple choices and short conversations. An older child can handle more options, competing priorities, and longer discussions.
It also helps to start with situations where there is genuinely room for discussion. If the answer has already been decided because of safety, health, or a firm family rule, there isn’t much to negotiate. Save the practice for situations where different solutions could reasonably work.
Negotiation, in the end, isn’t a lesson you deliver once and check off. It’s closer to something a child absorbs sideways, through dozens of small, unremarkable moments where they were allowed to make a case, hear a “no” or land on a compromise nobody handed them.
None of the five scenarios above need to go perfectly to be worth trying. What we’re trying to teach is the accumulated sense that their preferences are worth explaining, and that other people are worth hearing out in return.
That’s the part that stays with them long after the toy or the screen time or the playdate has been forgotten.