Limits? Boundaries? Me?

pic of barbed wireBoundaries and limits. Limits and boundaries. Life is full of these. Why would anyone try to raise a child without a proper grounding in these necessities? We can guess at some of the possible reasons, but people try to do it all the time. Really. All the time.

Sometimes we needn’t guess why certain individuals try to accomplish this trick. Obviously, people exist for whom something went slightly awry in their childhoods, something that made limits and boundaries seem as negative things when they are, rather, quite positive things—when executed properly, that is. It definitely can happen.

My own life provides evidence for how these social constructs can get a bad name. My parents are, as they say, no longer with us, but let’s just say they were no model for how to teach the value and benefit of boundaries and limits. They were inconsistent; they were needlessly harsh from time to time, and often hypocritical, sometimes transgressing the reasonable limits society had placed upon them, and doing so within sight of the kids. To their credit, perhaps, they did so with a certain admirable élan at times, but still, the fact of the violation, in the face of the strictures they applied to the children at home—well, it just didn’t take a juvenile genius to see through it all and come to one’s own conclusions on the matter. One began to see that boundaries and limits could be a pretty fungible commodity, and that is not the most comfortable discovery for a child to make.

And then life went on and put me in a place where, in 25 years as a teacher and coach in various institutions of public instruction, I learned the value of limits and boundaries while dealing with some 3000 young people—other people’s kids, in fact—many of whom had never heard of such a thing as a boundary before and perhaps not even since.

I’m not saying it always went terribly well. Admittedly, sometimes I erred, setting limits where none were needed, other times voiding boundaries where they really would have benefited all involved. (One sometimes hopes for more maturity among young people than really exists; it happens, believe me.) Many times, however, it wasn’t my errors that caused the problems. Sometimes I did a fine job, for my own part, but found that I had come across this, that, or another young person whose own parents had either tried to eschew limits and boundaries, or made a hash of the process of teaching them as had my own parents. They even tried to instruct me from time to time as to the absolute foolishness of the idea in the first place. They obviously were trying to raise their children without limits and wanted me to validate their efforts by continuing the practice at school.

And finding such children, ones raised without boundaries, is no real feat. Their parents have fallen for all the bad advice out there. Anyone who looks can find well meaning but crackpot advice on how to raise screwed-up kids. Do your own search if you doubt me.

But what if your child is not screwed up…yet? The best thing in that case is also the simplest: Set some reasonable, humane limits and boundaries, make sure the child knows right where they are, and go about your business. You’ll be surprised at how easy life gets, and not just for you and your kids, but for the rest of the world—his or her teachers, coaches, and other associates included. It is an astounding win-win situation for everyone involved. Yet the opposite happens all too frequently.

If you are still having difficulty sharing this vision, consider the many times in our youths that we have had the experience of “breaking in” a new teacher. In these days of low teacher retention, by the way, this experience is occurring all too frequently, but it tends to follow a predictable scenario. Coming in to the public schools, the new teacher receives all kinds of good advice. Such sayings as ,“It’s easier to lighten up than to tighten up,” and “Don’t smile until Christmas” are suggested as guidelines by experienced teachers, but these sage pronouncements are either misunderstood as being too harsh or rejected outright on some basis, philosophical or otherwise. The typical new teacher somehow thinks that his or her special qualities will make these measures unnecessary. He or she will change the face of education with some special brand of brilliance. These new teachers will show the veteran teacher how the job should be done.

Well, you’ll remember I mentioned that these teachers need breaking in, and they do. What they need to discover is the need for boundaries and limits. They want to operate without them, but they will never be effective until they impose them.

See, the fact that people work so hard to avoid is that every human relationship is, by its nature, a power relationship. If you say, “No, that can’t be,” you’re just being naïve. Sure, many power relationships are negotiated such that the parties will share more or less equal power. Others are negotiated such that one party will hold sway in certain situations while the other will dominate in others. Still, the most important aspect of forming relationships with others is discovering the nature of the power relationship you will have with that person.

When one of those people is an adult and the other is a child, the most appropriate power relationship is one in which the adult assumes the decision-making role, even as he or she cedes certain elements or fragments of that power to the child. And the thing people don’t seem to “get” is that kids like it that way.

Oh, they don’t seem to like it that way; in fact, they fight and fight to arrange things differently. But in the final analysis, it makes children uncomfortable when they come to the realization that they have the power in the relationship with an adult. Hey, kids aren’t stupid; they just don’t know very much; in fact, they often don’t even know what is in their best interest. But one of the things they know, way back in the background where they don’t want you looking, is that they know they don’t know very much. It makes them uneasy to think that the adults in their lives have ceded decision-making power to them. On a certain level, they think, “Hey, why are you asking me? Don’t you know how this is supposed to go?” Such children push and push, trying to find the limit; meanwhile such parents sigh and look skyward, wondering when the child will ever learn. Well, what are they supposed to learn? How to take control of a relationship with an adult? Really?

The fact is that deep down, children want to be guided, even as they rankle against it. They want to rankle against it, and they also want to be guided. It is not one of those mutually exclusive situations. Kids can do both of these vastly dichotomous things with remarkable ease. It’s an ease developed organically through years of surprising—and impressing—their parents while thinking themselves sadly deficient in any number of ways.

“But they’re so smart!” you hear the doting parents saying. “Maybe the children know more than we do,” you hear them saying. Who knows? Perhaps the Biblical injunction that, “a little child shall lead them,” carries some unwarranted weight with them.

Adherents to that advice fail to consider that this quotation is taken from a catalog of unnatural acts described in Isaiah 11, images of a fantasy world in which evil, as we tend to define the term, no longer exists. To give you some notion of the incongruities contained in that passage, keep in mind that one encounters leopards lying down with goats, lions eating straw, for crying out loud, and infants playing with vipers without the slightest negative consequence, at least in the Utopian world Isaiah lays out for us.

Without evil, of course, there is no need for boundaries and limits. But the whole time I’m reading this, I’m thinking, “Where are that child’s parents, letting him fool around with venomous asps?”

For his own part, after describing life on the “holy mountain,” Isaiah goes on to finish thus:

“They will neither harm nor destroy …
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.”

Notice the nifty little koan at the end there. “Full of knowledge” conveys volume while “cover the sea” implies vast two-dimensionality. Said another way, an enlightened person’s understanding would be as capacious as something massively flat. Obviously, the two things simply do not belong in the same comparison, but there you have it. Ancient editors sometimes earned a reputation for laxity. Or is this, rather, just a statement on the improbability of a world in which limits and boundaries have no place?

Well, undoubtedly, it is a nice world where all of these critters live, and I’d love to vacation there some time, but for most of us, it is helpful to have a healthy understanding that man, even as a social animal, has many anti-social impulses and tendencies. Part of what each culture passes down is a system for keeping those impulses and tendencies in check. They do so by imposing boundaries and limits, sometimes famously harsh and unrealistic.

Of course. No one today is going to argue that these harsh, unrealistic rules and punishments are a good thing. Some ancients would seem to disagree, however. Hammurabi (18th century BC Babylon) and Draco (7th century BC Athens) were noted for a certain degree of inflexibility and harshness. Today, the poorly understood priciples of Sharia, which originated in Middle East during the 7th century, have come in for some criticism.

Most of these are noted for their liberal use of the death penalty, but before all of you people of European origin begin to feel too smug, please remember that jolly old England once engaged in some pretty barbaric practices. Consider for a moment being burned at the stake, being drawn and quartered, or being broken on the wheel. None of these is any better than that quaint Roman practice of crucifixion.

But what is the purpose of all of these enterprises? It is not the mere exegency of ridding ourselves of malefactors; that could be done in private—or not at all since we all easily could have run afoul of the cultural and religious strictures of times gone by. Rather, these practices sought to make examples of the unlucky malefactors among us who happened to get caught. At some point, people became aware that we are not much improved by seeing public spectacles of punishment, nor by the hypocrisy that accompanies them. Nor do they serve as deterrents; the notion that cutpurses worked the crowds at the hangings of pickpockets is not without basis in fact.

History, nonetheless, is full of leaders and movements that thought this the wise choice, but in the typical 21st century family, logic must make way for some course through the opposite extremes. Voiding well considered strictures is just as silly as creating harsh, inflexible codes of conduct and punishments for violations. But the trend, definitely, is toward laxity. One sees this everywhere, and while the effect of some of this is to make the world a more humane and less hypocritical place, taking it too far creates problems of its own.

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