The teeth had to be brushed. The method could maybe change.

Iris, my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, was already in her pyjamas when I handed her toothbrush to her.

“Your turn.”

She pressed her lips together.

I waited a few seconds, then tried the firmer version.

“Iris, you need to brush your teeth before bed.”

She shook her head, grabbed her little plastic crocodile from beside the sink and replied:

“Him first.”

My first instinct was to say no. It was late, the crocodile clearly had no dental emergency and I simply wanted to finish the bedtime routine.

Except the problem was not really that she wanted to brush the crocodile’s teeth. The problem, in my head, was mainly that she was not following the order I had planned.

And those were not necessarily the same thing.

When a child refuses to brush their teeth

Brushing teeth is one of those moments where there is not much room for choice. We can discuss plenty of things in an evening, but we cannot really decide that tonight we will simply skip brushing.

The trap is accidentally turning the whole scene into one non-negotiable block: the toothbrush now, at the sink, in this exact order, with no detour and no play.

At that point, every little request from the child can feel like an attempt to push back the limit.

Yet we can keep the limit while letting the things around it move.

That evening, I held the crocodile in front of Iris.

“Okay. You brush his teeth, then we’ll do yours.”

She very seriously scrubbed the plastic mouth for ten seconds.

Then she handed me the crocodile.

“Now me.”

Keep the “what”, loosen the “how”

Since then, I have been trying to separate what genuinely has to happen from the way I had imagined it happening.

The teeth have to be brushed. But Iris can sometimes choose whether she starts or I do, whether the crocodile watches, or whether she would rather stand on the step stool than sit on my lap.

That does not mean opening a twenty-minute negotiation at every bedtime. If the options make things even more complicated, we can simply return to a short sentence.

That evening, everything did not suddenly become magically smooth. Iris still asked to rinse the crocodile, then to find him a towel.

I said no to the towel.

She protested a little, then opened her mouth.

The limit had not changed. I had simply stopped defending all the things around it that could perfectly well be different.