How kids hack tired parents with PowerPoint presentations to get what they want.
Around three years ago, my then-nine-year-old daughter convened a formal “meeting” in the living room. She mirrored her laptop to the TV and proceeded to present a Google Slides deck outlining her birthday wishlist. We were astonished. “A genius!” I whispered to my wife, only 95% in jest.
The presentation was, for a primary school kid, impressive. It featured headings, carefully sourced imagery, and – crucially – embedded links to exact product pages. (The final slide, I recall, was a stock photo of a pile of cash, but no link to the Reserve Bank.) We knew she used Chromebooks at school, but surely this wasn’t in the curriculum? This wasn’t a book report; it was a boardroom proposal.
When I recently asked her where she got her inspiration, her answer was surprisingly banal. “I knew you used slides in meetings at work, but it’s also how teachers use them in class,” she explained. “So we’re just used to seeing things that look like that.” The slide deck, for her generation, doesn’t carry corporate baggage, it’s just the default medium for any message requiring structure and persuasion.
And it became her preferred mode of request. A Christmas list soon followed in the same format. She later helped her younger brother produce a more rudimentary version. Then, near the end of summer: Why We Should Get a Dog. This multi-slide argument featured not just multiple stock photos of adorable blue heeler puppies but a full breakdown of projected costs and related chores – both wildly optimistic.
So, what’s happening here? Is this the creeping professionalisation of childhood, or a clever generational hack? When I posed the question directly, her rationale was a blend of strategy and logistics. “I think I saw it on TikTok,” she said simply. “I thought, if I ask this way, you’d have to hear me out. Plus, you get to see what it looks like, and the links mean you get the exact right thing.”
My family is not an anomaly. Gemma Freeman, a Christchurch mother of two, says her now-13-year-old began a similar practice about three years ago. It started as digital mood boards and evolved into persuasive pitches for everything from a room makeover to a smartphone.
For Freeman’s daughter, the journey began not with corporate mimicry, but with digital creativity, using an app called Sketches on her iPad. “At some point she stopped drawing with her finger and started arranging other images and type, digitally collecting her favourite things,” Freeman explains. “It’s like what I would have done, cutting things out of magazines and pasting them in a scrapbook.” The tool is new, but the impulse isn’t. The difference is one of scale, precision, and persuasive power.
Perhaps we, over-consultative managerial middle class parents, are the prime architects of this shift. I have no memory of “family meetings” in my 1980s childhood. We were kids, not stakeholders. Now, children expect not just a say but a structured input. This mirrors a broader cultural shift where adult life itself has been gamified and professionalised — from productivity apps that track our sleep to spreadsheets that manage our hobbies. Our children are merely reflecting this ethos of managed life back at us in the realm of persuasion.
On platforms like TikTok, trends like #PowerPointNight have turned the presentation into a form of social entertainment and a mode of shared learning. Pop culture provides the blueprint: Freeman points to the 2023 movie You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, where the protagonist delivers an elaborate bat mitzvah proposal deck to her parents.
Beyond the technical skill, this is an accidental education in soft skills. We are witnessing the bleed of a persuasive aesthetic into the domestic sphere. When a pre-teen’s social life involves curating a personal brand, is it any wonder the home begins to feel like a small, intimate start-up? Ideas require pitch decks; budgets require justification. Freeman, who works in a corporate environment, finds the subversion charming. “I’m surrounded by very dull PowerPoint use, but they make something cool and fun out of it. I think it’s a perfectly valid way for sharing information or extravagant wish lists.”
This shift from emotional plea to visual negotiation strips away the noise. There is no whining, no pleading – just bullet points and JPEGs. It creates a neutral, low-conflict zone for discussion. The format itself forces a pause, interrupting the exhausting cycle of nagging and reflexive denial.
But does it actually work? The data from my unscientific focus group – other parents – suggests a surprisingly high success rate. Yet the victory is rarely won on the merits of the content alone. The true clincher is the effort. When a child spends an afternoon sourcing images, formatting text, and sequencing arguments, they are signaling a powerful form of commitment. As Freeman admits, “I do probably engage with it slightly more than a list. They are visually appealing and they grab me. And you’ve occupied yourself for however long.” This dedicated effort answers the parent’s silent question: Are they serious? The presentation becomes proof of concept.
More subtly, the deck performs a profound service for the anxious parental mind. It converts a nebulous, high-stakes emotional request (“Please! I promise I’ll be responsible!”) into a manageable, familiar work task. A slide headed “My Responsibilities & Contributions” is not a vague promise; it is a document. It can be saved, referenced, and held to account. It transforms a leap of faith into a project with deliverables.
In this way, our children are performing a brilliant hack of the modern parenting psyche. Millennial and Gen X parents are drowning in what sociologist Arlie Hochschild termed “emotional labour.” We are decision-fatigued, our cognitive bandwidth perpetually overloaded by the invisible work of managing a household. By framing a desire as a pitch, the child speaks the only language we have sufficient processing power left to comprehend: logistics. Here’s what I want, here’s what it’ll cost, here’s what I’ll contribute. Saying “yes” no longer feels like surrendering to a nag; it feels like approving a thoughtfully prepared proposal.
We can, of course, recognise the potential dark sides of this trend – class privilege, digital privacy, endless consumption, the corporatisation of everything, etc. etc., but according to Gemma Freeman, we may be over-intellectualising a timeless dynamic. “I would have done some extremely lo-fi version of this in the 90s, maybe making a fake fax or something,” she says. “What’s the difference? It’s just a tool… and kids have always been asking parents to buy them more stuff.”
The tool, however, changes the nature of the transaction. In my house, I’ve seen an interesting renegotiation. The traditional currency of parental power is being met with a new form of capital: digital fluency, structured effort, and a strategy that acknowledges the parent’s time and concerns.
The presentation for the dog did not succeed – yet. But the next pitch item is surely coming. They are learning that in the contemporary home, the clearest path to getting what you want is not to raise your voice, but to raise a persuasive, yet calm, argument. They are learning to meet our exhaustion with evidence, our anxiety with structure. And in doing so, they are learning, far earlier than we ever did, how the adult world works and how to get what they want.
