Using kids' desires as leverage

I was reading Spiritual Parenting by Hugh and Gayle Prather until I put it aside because my friend Julie loaned me the AMAZING book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I just finished the section on Italy last night and had to go downstairs to eat a bowl of pasta with pesto and cream...a poor substitute for the real Italian stuff, but she made me! I have to admit, the Prathers were beginning to lose my interest around page 40, but I really liked the following two paragraphs, and thought I'd share them, and remind myself to not try to change my kids...

[Their house up to this point has been tiled, with no soft surfaces on the floor due to their son's severe allergies.] "...[Jordan] had been lobbying for a rug in his bedroom for several weeks...When Jordan first brought this subject up, we made the mistake that many parents make. Instead of considering the request strictly on its own merits and out of our desire for what was best for Jordan, our unconscious response was 'Oh, one of our sons wants something. How can we use this as leverage?' Most adults are actually far more manipulative than most children. [emphasis mine] Using our kids' desires as leverage is just one of many ways we manipulate them, but it is a particularly unloving way because, in a sense, we are asking them to sell their souls. We hold out something they want and say 'You can have it as soon as you become the person I want you to be.' As soon as you become a neat, tidy person; or a more outgoing person; or a punctual person; or an academically oriented person; or a 'respectful' person. The truth is that many of the world's geniuses, mystics and greatest innovators were not tidy, outgoing, punctual, or especially polite. Jesus was not respectful of authority; Einstein found school boring and showed little scholastic ability; and Buddha rejected his father's idea of family duty.
Usually it's because they still have some degree of inner strength and integrity, and not because they are perverse, that children fail to live up to the so-called negotiations or contracts adults make with them -- the terms of which, in reality, are conceived of and imposed by adults and are not "agreements" at all. In many instances children are fighting for their identity and not "waging a power struggle" when they deviate from a parent's understanding of what a child "agreed" to do. Often they are withstanding a basic misuse of parental authority and power."

Not that I expect/want my girls to grow up to be the next Einstein/Buddha/Jesus, but why risk squelching them?