Naming the trick

Pressure works best while it is invisible. A child who feels hurried simply feels hurried; the feeling arrives as their own. But a child who can think "I am being hurried so that I do not think" has stepped outside the trick, and from outside, most tricks look small. This is why the Pressure half of Says Who? is built around thirteen named tactics rather than general advice about peer pressure. General advice evaporates in the moment. A name sticks.

The shapes a child will actually meet, in the app and in the playground:

• The hurry. "Quick, before the teacher comes back." Urgency exists so that thinking cannot happen. Anything that must be decided this second is usually wrong to do at all.
• Everyone is doing it. The count of people doing a thing says nothing about whether the thing is fine. Lots of people saying it does not make it true has a card of its own in the other half of the game.
• The dare. Reframes refusal as cowardice, so the child stops weighing the act and starts defending their pride.
• Flattery. "You're the only one brave enough." A compliment with a hook through it.
• Guilt. "After everything I've done for you." Debt is invented, then collected.
• Borrowed permission. "My mum lets me." Somebody else's rules, offered as if they transfer.
• The bribe. Payment for a thing nobody would do unpaid is information about the thing.
• Wearing you down. The same ask, repeated, until yes costs less than the asking. Each ask is small; the campaign is the trick.
• The tiny first step. "Just hold it for a second." The first step is chosen to be too small to refuse, because the second one is not.
• Not a big deal. Shrinks the act before the child can look at it properly.
• Keep it secret. The clearest one of all. A thing that must be hidden from every adult has already been judged, by the person hiding it.

The remaining two tactics in the game are the honest ones, and they matter as much: a real reason, given plainly, and no pressure at all. A child who has met eleven kinds of push learns to notice their absence, and that absence is what trust feels like.