Skip to main content

Loving boundaries for my children

There was a writing group topic recently that really got me thinking. It was about "tough love", a term I find can be a bit problematic because it's just another term for punishment. The way I see it, love has nothing to do with punishment but it can have a lot to do with holding a boundary: a healthy boundary. A sustainable boundary. 

I grew up largely without boundaries. My father, at least while I was little and before he fully succumbed to drinking at all times, subscribed to a parenting philosophy I can only describe as unparenting - that is, simply allowing everything. "Don't fence the child in, let her develop without constraints!"... every time my mother attempted to correct or discipline me, he would either stop her or undermine her afterwards to undo it. She eventually gave up trying.

As a result, I was a truly unlikeable child who had no idea of what was and wasn't appropriate, who thought of myself as an equal to the adults around, who expected things to go my way at all times or else. And at the same time I was deeply, deeply confused and insecure because sometimes things would blow up big because I had gone way above and beyond a boundary I didn't know was there. 

As a parent now, I am very different. I give my children clear boundaries, which I communicate clearly and within which they have freedom. I do try to say yes as often as I can, but when I do have to say no, that will not change. - well actually, I need to modify that statement: that was the case when they were little. Now they're growing older, 6 and 5, and if they have a good reason or argument to bring then I will listen and I might change the no. Although it never changes in response to anger, aggression, crying or whining (which, by now, is an extremely rare occurrence from them anyway); but if they do have a good argument why I should say yes, I'm always open to hearing it. However, when the answer is no and they don't like it, I am there for them in their disappointment... but the boundary stands, it's safe. 

As a result, they are very secure and happy children: and they do take no for an answer the vast majority of the time I have to say it. Is that tough love? I don't know - the way I see it, it is simply caring love. Giving and holding boundaries to them is love. I wouldn't do the work of teaching them boundaries if I didn't care: and the lack of boundaries growing up felt a lot like lack of love. No one cared if I was out all day and night at age 10. Some would call that freedom, but it really wasn't.

I am no perfect parent by any stretch. But I am a million times more emotionally available to my children than my parents ever were to me, I am actively shaping their upbringing and giving my little lambs a safe, secure "field" with safe, strong boundaries around it - in which they can play, grow and learn. It's the best I know to do for them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...