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hannon couldn’t stop crying. A young mother of two preschool children, she couldn’t imagine herself being angry, out of control, and certainly not abusive. Yet a week ago, she had picked up three-year-old Robby and shaken him. Hard. She had screamed at him. Loudly. And it wasn’t the first time. She had done it numerous times in the past year. The only difference was that this time, Shannon almost physically injured her son.She was frightened.
The experience had so shaken Shannon and her husband, Gerald, that they called and made an appointment with me to discuss what had happened. Her shame and guilt were intense.
She avoided eye contact with me as she told her story.
The several hours before Shannon had lost control with Robby had been horrible. Gerald and she had had an argument over breakfast. He had left for work without saying good-bye.
Then one-year-old Tanya spilled cereal all over the floor. And Robby chose that morning to do everything he’d been told not to for the past three years. He pulled the cat’s tail. He figured out how to open the front door, and he ran outside into the yard and into the street. He smeared Shannon’s lipstick all over the white dining room wall, and he pushed Tanya to the floor.
This last incident was the straw that broke Shannon’s back.
Seeing Tanya lying on the floor, crying, with Robby standing over her with a defiantly pleased look, was too much. Shannon saw red and impulsively ran to her son. You know the rest of the story.
After she had calmed down a little, I asked Shannon how she and Gerald normally disciplined Robby.
“Well, we don’t want to alienate Robby, or quench his spirit,” Gerald began. “Being negative is so. . .so. . .negative. So we try to reason with him. Sometimes we’ll warn him that ‘you won’t get ice cream tonight.’ Sometimes we try to praise good things he does. And sometimes we try to ignore the bad behav-ior. Then maybe he’ll stop it.”
“Doesn’t he push the limits?”
Both parents nodded. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Shannon said. “It’s like he doesn’t hear us. He keeps on doing what he jolly well pleases. And generally, he’ll keep it up until one of us explodes and yells at him. I guess we just have a problem child.”
“Well, there’s certainly a problem,” I replied. “But perhaps Robby has been trained to not respond to anything but out-of-control rage. Let’s talk about boundaries and kids. . . .”
Of all the areas in which boundaries are crucially important, none is more relevant than that of raising children. How we approach boundaries and child rearing will have enormous impact on the characters of our kids. On how they develop val-ues. On how well they do in school. On the friends they pick. On whom they marry. And on how well they do in a career.
The Importance of Family
God, at his deepest level, is a lover (1 John 4:8). He is rela-tionally oriented and relarela-tionally driven. He desires connection with us from womb to tomb: “I have loved you with an everlast-ing love” (Jer. 31:3). God’s loveverlast-ing nature isn’t passive. It’s active.
Love multiplies itself. God the relational Lover is also God the aggressive Creator. He wants to fill up his universe with beings who care for him—and for each other.
The family is the social unit God invented to fill up the world with representatives of his loving character. It’s a place for nurtur-ing and developnurtur-ing babies until they’re mature enough to go out of the family as adults and to multiply his image in other surroundings.
God first picked the nation Israel to be his children. After centuries of resistance by Israel, however, God chose the church: “Because of [Israel’s] transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious” (Rom. 11:11). The body of Christ has the same role as Israel had—to multiply God’s love and character.
The church is often described as a family. We are to do good
“especially to those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal.
6:10). Believers “are members of God’s household” (Eph. 2:19).
We are to “know how people ought to conduct themselves in God’s household” (1 Tim. 3:15).
These and many other powerful passages show us how God
“thinks family.” He explains his heart as a parent would. He’s a daddy. He likes his job. This biblical portrayal of God helps show us how parenting is such a vital part of bringing God’s own character to this planet in our own little ones.
Boundaries and Responsibility
God, the good parent, wants to help us, his children, grow up. He wants to see us “become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Part of this maturing process is helping us know how to take responsibility for our lives.
It’s the same with our own flesh-and-blood kids. Second only to learning how to bond, to form strong attachments, the most important thing parents can give children is a sense of responsi-bility—knowing what they are responsible for and knowing what they aren’t responsible for, knowing how to say no and knowing how to accept no. Responsibility is a gift of enormous value.
We’ve all been around middle-aged people who have the boundaries of an eighteen-month-old. They have tantrums or sulk when others set limits on them, or they simply fold and comply with others just to keep the peace. Remember that these adult people started off as little people. They learned long, long ago to either fear or hate boundaries. The relearning process for adults is laborious.
Instilling vs. Repairing Boundaries
A wise mother of adult children once watched her younger friend struggle with her youngster. The child was refusing to behave, and the young mother was quickly losing her mind.
Affirming the mother’s decision to make the child sit on a chair by himself, the older woman said, “Do it now, Dear. Discipline the child now—and you just might survive adolescence.”
Developing boundaries in young children is that proverbial ounce of prevention. If we teach responsibility, limit setting, and delay of gratification early on, the smoother our children’s later years of life will be. The later we start, the harder we and they have to work.
If you’re a parent of older children, don’t lose heart. It just means boundary development will be met with more resistance.
In their minds, they do not have a lot to gain by learning bound-aries. You’ll need to spend more time working on it, getting more support from friends—and praying harder! We’ll review age-appropriate boundary tasks for the different stages of child-hood later in this chapter.
Boundary Development in Children
The work of boundary development in children is the work of learning responsibility. As we teach them the merits and lim-its of responsibility, we teach them autonomy—we prepare them to take on the tasks of adulthood.
The Scriptures have much to say about the role of boundary setting in child rearing. Usually, we call it discipline. The Hebrew and Greek words that scholars translate as “discipline”
mean “teaching.” This teaching has both a positive and a nega-tive slant.
The positive facets of discipline are proactivity, prevention, and instruction. Positive discipline is sitting someone down to educate and train him in a task: fathers are to raise children “in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). The nega-tive facets of discipline are correction, chastisement, and
conse-quences. Negative discipline is letting children suffer the results of their actions to learn a lesson in responsibility: “Stern disci-pline awaits him who leaves the path” (Prov. 15:10).
Good child rearing involves both preventive training and practice, and correctional consequences. For example, you set a ten o’clock bedtime for your fourteen-year-old. “It’s there so that you’ll get enough sleep to be alert in school,” you tell her.
You’ve just disciplined positively. Then your teen dawdles until 11:30 P.M. The next day you say, “Because you did not get to bed on time last night, you may not use the phone today.” You’ve just disciplined negatively.
Why are both the carrot and the whip necessary in good boundary development? Because God uses practice—trial and error—to help us grow up. We learn maturity by getting infor-mation, applying it poorly, making mistakes, learning from our mistakes, and doing better the next time.
Practice is necessary in all areas of life: in learning to ski, write an essay, or operate a computer. We need practice in developing a deep love relationship and in learning to study the Bible. And it’s just as true in our spiritual and emotional growth:
“But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:14).
Practice is important in learning boundaries and responsibility.
Our mistakes are our teachers.
Discipline is an external boundary, designed to develop internal boundaries in our children. It provides a structure of safety until the child has enough structure in his character to not need it. Good discipline always moves the child toward more internal structure and more responsibility.
We need to distinguish between discipline and punishment.
Punishment is payment for wrongdoing. Legally, it’s paying a penalty for breaking the law. Punishment doesn’t leave a lot of room for practice, however. It’s not a great teacher. The price is too high: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), and “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10). Punishment does not leave much room for mistakes.
Discipline, however, is different. Discipline is not pay-ment for a wrong. It’s the natural law of God: our actions reap consequences.
Discipline is different from punishment because God is fin-ished punishing us. Punishment ended on the cross for all those who accept Christ as Savior: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24). Christ’s suffering paid for our wrongdoing.
In addition, discipline and punishment have a different rela-tionship to time. Punishment looks back. It focuses on making payment for wrongs done in the past. Christ’s suffering was pay-ment, for example, for our sin. Discipline, however, looks for-ward. The lessons we learn from discipline help us to not make the same mistakes again: “God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness” (Heb. 12:10).
How does that help us? It frees us to make mistakes without fear of judgment, without fear of loss of relationship: “There-fore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). The freedom of the cross allows us to prac-tice without having to pay a terrible price. The only danger is consequences—not isolation and judgment.
Take, for example, the mother who tells her ten-year-old,
“You smart off again, and I won’t love you anymore.” The youngster is immediately in a no-win situation. She can either rebel and lose her most important relationship in life, or she can comply and become externally obedient, losing any chance of practicing confrontational skills. Now, compare that response with this, “I’ll never stop loving you. That’s a constant in my heart. However, if you smart off again you’ve lost your boom box for three days.” The relationship is still intact. There’s no con-demnation. And the child gets an opportunity to choose respon-sibility or suffer consequences—with no risk of losing love and safety. This is the way to maturity, to learning to eat solid food:
the safe practice of discipline.
The Boundary Needs of Children
What specific needs do boundaries meet in our kids? Limit-setting abilities have several important jobs that will pay enor-mous dividends throughout life.
Self-Protection
Have you ever seen anything more helpless than the human infant? Human babies are less able to take care of themselves than animal babies. God designed the newborn months as a means for the mother and father (or another caregiver) to con-nect deeply with their infant, knowing that without their minute-by-minute care, the baby would not survive. All this time and energy translates into an enduring attachment, in which the child learns to feel safe in the world.
God’s program of maturation, however, doesn’t stop there.
Mom and Dad can’t always be there to care and provide. The task of protection needs to ultimately pass on to the children.
When they grow up, they need to protect themselves.
Boundaries are our way of protecting and safeguarding our souls. Boundaries are designed to keep the good in and the bad out. And skills such as saying no, telling the truth, and main-taining physical distance need to be developed in the family structure to allow the child to take on the responsibility of self-protection.
Consider the following two twelve-year-old boys:
Jimmy is talking with his parents at the dinner table. “Guess what—some kids wanted me to smoke pot with them. When I told them I didn’t want to, they said I was a sissy. I told them they were dumb. I like some of them, but if they can’t like me because I don’t smoke pot, I guess they aren’t really my friends.”
Paul comes home after school with red eyes, slurred speech, and coordination difficulties. When asked by his concerned par-ents what is wrong, he denies everything until, finally, he blurts out, “Everybody’s doing it. Why do you hate my friends?”
Both Jimmy and Paul come from Christian homes with lots of love and an adherence to biblical values. Why did they turn out so differently? Jimmy’s family allowed disagreements between parent and child and gave him practice in the skill of boundary setting, even with them. Jimmy’s mom would be holding and hug-ging her two-year-old when he would get fidgety. He’d say,
“Down,” meaning, “Let me get a little breathing space, Ma.”
Fighting her own impulses to hold on to her child, she would set him down on the floor and say, “Wanna play with your trucks?”
Jimmy’s dad used the same philosophy. When wrestling with his son on the floor, he tried to pay attention to Jimmy’s limits.
When the going got too rough, or when Jimmy was tired, he could say, “Stop, Daddy,” and Dad would get up. They’d go to another game.
Jimmy was receiving boundary training. He was learning that when he was scared, in discomfort, or wanted to change things, he could say no. This little word gave him a sense of power in his life. It took him out of a helpless or compliant posi-tion. And Jimmy could say it without receiving an angry and hurt response, or a manipulative countermove, such as, “But Jimmy, Mommy needs to hold you now, okay?”
Jimmy learned from infancy on that his boundaries were good and that he could use them to protect himself. He learned to resist things that weren’t good for him.
A hallmark of Jimmy’s family was permission to disagree.
When, for example, Jimmy would fight his parents about his bedtime, they never withdrew or punished him for disagreeing.
Instead, they would listen to his reasoning, and, if it seemed appropriate, they would change their minds. If not, they would maintain their boundaries.
Jimmy was also given a vote in some family matters. When family night out would come up, his parents listened to his opin-ion on whether they should go to a movie, play board games, or play basketball. Was this a family with no limits? On the con-trary! It was a family who took boundary setting seriously—as a skill to develop in its children.
This was good practice for resisting in the evil day (Eph.
5:16), when some of Jimmy’s friends turned on him and pres-sured him to take drugs. How was Jimmy able to refuse?
Because by then, he’d had ten or eleven years of practice dis-agreeing with people who were important to him without losing their love. He didn’t fear abandonment in standing up against his friends. He’d done it many times successfully with his fam-ily with no loss of love.
Paul, on the other hand, came from a different family set-ting. In his home, no had two different responses. His mom would be hurt and withdraw and pout. She would send guilt messages, such as “How can you say no to your mom who loves you?” His dad would get angry, threaten him, and say things like, “Don’t talk back to me, Mister.”
It didn’t take long for Paul to learn that to have his way, he had to be externally compliant. He developed a strong yes on the out-side, seeming to agree with his family’s values and control. What-ever he thought about a subject—the dinner menu, TV restrictions, church choices, clothes, or curfews—he stuffed inside.
Once, when he had tried to resist his mother’s hug, she had immediately withdrawn from him, pushing him away with the words, “Someday you’ll feel sorry for hurting your mother’s feelings like that.” Day by day, Paul was being trained to not set limits.
As a result of his learned boundarylessness, Paul seemed to be a content, respectful son. The teens, however, are a crucible for kids. We find out what kind of character has actually been built into our children during this difficult passage.
Paul folded. He gave in to his friends’ pressure. Is it any wonder that the first people he said no to were his parents—at twelve years old? Resentment and the years of not having boundaries were beginning to erode the compliant, easy-to-live-with false self he’d developed to survive.
Taking Responsibility for One’s Needs
The group therapy session I was leading was quiet. I’d just asked Janice an unanswerable question. The question was,
“What do you need?” She looked confused, became thoughtful, and sat back in her chair.
Janice had just described a week of painful loss: her husband had made moves to separate, her kids were out of control, and her job was in jeopardy. The concern on the faces of the group members, who were all working on issues of attachment and safety, was evident. Yet no one knew quite how to help. So when I asked the question, I was asking it for all of us. But Janice couldn’t answer.
This was typical of Janice’s background. She’d spent most of her childhood taking responsibility for her parents’ feelings. The peacemaker of the house, she was always smoothing over the ruf-fled feathers of either parent, with soothing words like, “Mom, I’m sure Dad didn’t mean to blow up at you—he’s had a rough day.”
The result of such unbiblical responsibility toward her fam-ily was clear in Janice’s life: a sense of overresponsibility for oth-ers and a lack of attunement toward her own needs. Janice had radar out for the hurts of others; but the radar pointed her way was broken. It was no wonder she couldn’t answer my question.
Janice didn’t understand her own God-given, legitimate needs.
She had no vocabulary for this thinking.
The story does, however, have a happy ending. One of the group members said, “If I were in your shoes, I know what I’d need. I’d really need to know that you people in this room cared for me, that you didn’t see me as a colossal, shameful failure, and that you’d pray for me and let me call you on the phone this week for support.”
Janice’s eyes began watering. Something about her friend’s empathic statement touched her in a place she couldn’t herself touch. And she allowed the comfort that comes from others who have been comforted to take its place inside her (2 Cor. 1:4).
Janice’s story illustrates the second fruit of boundary devel-opment in our children: the ability to take ownership of, or responsibility for, our own needs. God intends for us to know when we’re hungry, lonely, in trouble, overwhelmed, or in need of a break—and then to take initiative to get what we need. The Scriptures present Jesus as understanding this point when he left