The little I know,
Now let’s explore the reality of this issue.
And thus you prepare your rhetorical escape hatch.
I noted earlier than boundaries, to be effective, must be taught, not imposed. I want the guardrails on the highway to serve as a visual cue to maintain the proper direction of my car.
Agreed.
To create a guardrail that one will continually ram, even if it effectively blocked the vehicle from exiting the highway, is not a boundary, but a barrier.
This is nonsensical. If my car is continually ramming a barrier, it’s not because the highway administration randomly put a guardrail up for my car to crash into. It’s because my car is veering off the road.
My kids need to be happy in my home
My kids need to be safe, nourished, nurtured, loved, and prepared for adulthood in my home. G-d willing most of the time they will also be happy, but there will be times that they are not. And in those situations it is my role as a parent to help them to respond positively to adversity and not always getting what they want. Not to do whatever I can to make them happy. That’s not a recipe for raising well adjusted and high functioning adults who are prepared for the real world.
Boundaries need to be taught, where the kids learn what is right and wrong, what is good or not.
I agree 100%.
I suggest that a great many OTD situations involve problems with this process, having been done incorrectly, or in a manner that was not effective.
I think there are cases where that is true. I think, unfortunately, that the majority of OTD issues arise within the influence of a toxic peer culture that directs kids to look to each other for guidance, not their parents. Children instinctively look for a single authority – see how upset they become if there is a disparity between what they are taught in school and what their parents say. If a child’s peers become his authority, then his resilience towards his parents shrinks considerably. Parents and children are not angels and will make mistakes, and in a normal world parent and child should be able to reconnect lovingly following a rupture. But when their world is filled with disrespectful teenage role models, connection becomes far more difficult.
Now that the kid is acting out, now we are going to impose boundaries.
Nope – just because a kid is acting out does not mean that all boundaries become magically transformed to newly imposed and punitive.
This does not work. This imposition of boundaries is a parallel with rejection, because that’s the only message. Sure, the situation is frustrating. I freak when my toddler grandchildren discover a light switch they can reach. No one wants chilul Shabbos in their home. But the fight is futile, and carries major risk, in short term and long term.
If rebellious teenagers decided to write a book on parenting teenagers, it’d probably read like this.
We may have done a great job at teaching boundaries to all our children. But if, for whatever reason, it did not work with this one child, I have an obligation to accomplish that teaching in a way that will be effective. That is the OTD kid. Not necessarily bad parents. Just the failure to match the right parenting skills needed for that kid.
And whoosh – out the escape hatch you go. Boundaries are good, but only if you “teach” them beforehand, and it’s almost impossible to teach them all beforehand. And now they’ll just be viewed as punitive. So…
Getting kind of long… -33