One important part of those negotiations (or any negotiation), she said, is empathizing—“allowing ourselves to just sit with our children in their feelings,” without agreeing or disagreeing, applying logic, or attempting to lift their spirits. “It’s only from a place of calm that children can negotiate in any real way,” Russell noted.

“So, moving away from the particular issue at stake to the process,” Wheeler explained.

a Harvard colleague, Deepak Malhotra, who had advised on the peace-brokering process between the Colombian government and FARC rebels: “His advice on ultimatums—take-it-or-leave-it kinds of statements—is to ignore them.

Direct bargaining—“I’ll give you this if you do that”—can be useful in a negotiation, but it’s also something to be cautious about. Wheeler told a possibly apocryphal anecdote about Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in which Kissinger watched Nixon use a treat to coax his Irish setter off a chair in the Oval Office. Kissinger supposedly told Nixon that the lesson the dog had learned was not that he should stay off the chair—but rather that if he got on the chair, he’d get a treat for getting off it. (In some tellings, the problem behavior was chewing the rug.)

One tactic he suggested is carefully structuring the choices kids are presented with.

One common feature of negotiations is that each party has the ability to walk away.

Ben: The business started blossoming when we were in Texas. I had told my wife to give me…Within five years we'll have a house and we'll both have good vehicles, dependable vehicles, but it's going to take a while. Well within a year and a half from when I started, we bought out first house and we both had good, dependable vehicles. However, it was still tight when I took a project on in Akron, Ohio. And when I took that project on, I did not want to go up there for many reasons. One, because I had this immigration issue on me and I'm going near the Canadian border. Another, I didn't really want to be away from my family.Ben: But when these customers get persistent, "What's it going to take? What's it going to take?" And I said, "It's just out of the question. I can't go up there, I got all these jobs going on. Plus, I got bad equipment, my equipment’s old and if my equipment breaks down up there, I'm not going to be able to meet the schedules and we're all going to be in trouble.” "Is that it? Really?" The last price he had upped the price of what the contract was to pay, and the pay was fine. I had other reasons why I didn't want to go. Well when he says, "I'll throw in a brand-new texture machine on top of it, but I'll sign off on the paperwork after you complete the project.” And I go, "You'll do that?" "I'll do that and when have you known me to not keep my word?" And I go, "Done deal.”Ben: One of those texture machines, the price tag at that time was about $30,000. Right now, it's probably closer to $40,000 because we're talking about 1996. And he followed through, I came up to Akron, when I got up to Akron though, they had projects, there were projects everywhere, Kentucky, Michigan. And the pay, the pay was awesome. And that is where it really, within I think about the second month that I was up north, it just completely changed.Ben: But I hadn't seen my wife and children since I had taken off up there. So, I told her to come up there and visit and I started discuss with her. I go, "Look these other jobs,” and I had already said I was going to take them, but I didn't tell her that. I told her, she says, "What if you go to be traveling?" I go, "It's worth it to be traveling back and forth, but I'm not going to be traveling back and forth. We're going to just take the kids; we're going to move up here and we're going to be together".Ben: And so that's when I moved them to Indianapolis. We stationed in Indianapolis although I did travel quite a bit. I was on the road quite a bit because I had later ended up with jobs as far down as Orlando, Florida. And I ended up in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to repair a bunch of apartments which we had worked on before. But it was a pretty wild ride, but we really were doing really well, and it was really amazing.

he 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act gives Congress 60 days to review the deal before Obama can begin lifting sanctions. In theory, they could vote to block US sanctions relief, which would violate the terms of the deal — effectively killing it