Limited Freedom and Freeing Limits

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Staying on the tightrope strung between limits and freedom requires parents to confront five dynamics they must keep in tune. Just like the strings on a guitar, though, each one will require occasional adjustment if we are going to keep everything in tune with the demands of completing the training challenge. They are:

1. Modeling the behaviors you want your kids to see, imitate, and reproduce

2. Instructing them on the standards and structures that represent your expectations

3. Coaching children with an eye to observation and supervision

4. Correcting the mistakes and attitudes in need of tweaking

5. Embedding your ultimate values, so your kids truly own what they have learned

Each of these activities will foster a learning environment where limits become something kids choose. The process will occur, nonstop, for every day of at least the eighteen years between their birth and the legal age for liberation. Tension will be the common theme at every point.

Explanation of each point will be defined in further posts. 

A Thought From Henry Cloud

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I like how Henry Cloud and John Townsend describe some of this process in their book Boundaries with Kids:

As a rule, children don’t know what they are doing. They have little idea how to handle life so that it works right. That’s why God gave them parents to love them, give them structure, and guide them into maturity. So, just as a puppy needs obedience training, kids need help from the outside. Basically, children will mature to the level the parent structures them, and no higher.’”

Training wheels, classrooms, and puppies. These are metaphors for real life. A child has to be trained. When a child is taught about freedom and limits, they find out about a tension they will live with as long as they function in this world. The tightrope is ultimately theirs to walk, because effective living requires the right combination of limits and freedom. That’s why children have to be trained on how both work.

Do You Control?

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Can I be honest? What I see in a lot of parents is a desire to control their kids rather than train them. The older they get, the more desperate the battle of wills gets, because parents want children to play within the limits they instill, but the child pushes everything to the limits of freedom. Control will never be the answer. Instead, you will be doing a balancing act, teetering between the extremes of limits on one side and freedom on the other.

You experience it with your children at various points along the way to their adulthood. When your son or daughter moves from a tricycle to a bike, there is an in-between stage when they need to ride with some help. Sometimes dad holds the seat, limiting the disastrous effects gravity will have on an untrained child. Some kids pick up the training quickly, but most need the help of something to limit the number of times they fall: training wheels. They are needed until that little boy or girl can deal with all the dynamics of two wheels instead of three or four. When they are ready, training wheels come off, and they are a little freer. They can now roam a neighborhood. Even then, they will still fall from time to time. And they are not ultimately free. They can’t fly, or go beyond a certain speed because there are still limits.

You see it in a training environment like a classroom, which is a controlled place with limits. Not only are there four walls, but there is a teacher who dictates the basis and pace of learning. But it’s an environment where a student gets trained in skills they will put into practice when they leave the classroom and go out into a world of freedom. The training will help them make right choices, like how to play well with others, read and follow directions, and schedule time for varied activities, to name a few. But in the end a student decides what to do with what the teacher offers, and ultimately takes it in or rejects the learning.

Let’s talk about it:
1) Has there been a time recently when your child decided to reject his or her learnings? What did that situation look like?

Walking The Parenting Tightrope

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The Bible describes it this way in Proverbs 22:6: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” Through parenting history, some have read those words as a promise, like if they paint by the numbers, God pledges a guaranteed outcome. If their child turns from what they were taught, they feel anger at God. When they loosen the rope only to watch one of their kids trip over it into bad choices, they feel confused. Many times a wayward child makes them feel guilty, like they must have missed something.

I don’t remember who first pointed it out to me, but this proverb is not a promise. It is a principle. God is telling us that if we do our level best to instill wisdom and right values into a child, they will be more likely to exercise personal freedom in favor of it. Your job is to train, to influence choice.

But the principle implies lots of deviation from “the way.” Training children how to live means they certainly will depart from the path, and often. Every fork in the road-whether to lie to mom when I’m not forced to be truthful, to use profanity when dad isn’t around to hear me, to fake an absentee note to cover skipping school-represents a choice.

Kids will lose their way when given a choice. You hope they will stay on the trail you trained them to take. They may not. As the proverb says, it might take years to change that pattern. Eventually, sometimes not until a child gets quite old and mom and dad are gone, that child makes a comeback to the course learned years before. Our job as parents is to train them in the right way to live, and to do so with the awareness we are helping children walk the tightrope between limits and freedom. If we position them so they can choose wisely, leveraging the tension instead of fighting it, we will have trained well.

Limits and Freedom

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Tension exists between imposing what matters to you as a mom or dad (limits) and a child wanting to make choices about how his or her life should be lived (freedom). What is the right answer? Should we guide children according to and inject our family values into them, and expect some level of compliance? Yes. Should we expect they will have opinions and make choices as they navigate life? Yes. Yes to both ends of the continuum.

It is the training challenge, and it looks like this:

Limits ——————————————– Freedom

When it comes to the training challenge, what do you do with limits and freedom? Both. The right answer? A tension-filled and. It requires a process of training.

Let’s talk about it:
1) What hills will you “die on” in order to keep limits?
2) What recently have you been lenient in giving freedom, allowing your child to make more choices? 

Yes, I Was A Leash Baby

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Our kids would to stay close most of the time. Once in a while they would get too far ahead. Or in Mark’s case, his tendency to engross himself in any item of immediate interest would leave us looking around for a child oblivious to even having parents. (Lynn got paged to retrieve him twice on one brief trip to a grocery store-Twinkies got him the first time, seasonal toys the second.)

Going From belting them down to running loose was too large a leap to freedom, so we found a helpful solution in one of those baby accessory catalogues. We used a device with Velcro straps on each end, one for mom or dad’s wrist and one for Phil, Mark, or Tim’s wrist, and a retractable cord like you see on phones between them. The elasticity of the cord allowed them measured freedom. Wrist straps limited them just enough for our comfort.

We saw ourselves as progressive, creative parents. Many mall-walkers stared mercilessly at us for being parents who would, and I quote, “leash their sons like dogs.”Despite fears ofbeing reported for abuse, we ignored them. We had to make a choice between squirming, loud, or tantrum-throwing little boys who wanted out of a stroller, and keeping track of three unrestricted, energetic, periodically barbaric little boys. Picking either option would have drawn a different set of accusing glares. And regardless of the looks, we needed some middle ground to train our boys how they must behave in places like malls, parks, and other public places. Call it what you will, but the “leash” helped us move our kids through measured steps toward increased freedom.

[It still surprises me that I was, yes, a leash baby. - Mark]

Tolerating the stares of strangers is good preparation for later parenting challenges: as children get older, you get their glares. Regardless of what you decide about limits, your kids will meet you with the sneering retort, “You’re so strict,” followed by a recitation of the liberal and gracious policies of every other parent who walks planet earth. Occasionally you will hold your ground, other times you’ll give in.

The space you give will be the proving ground for their readiness for more freedom, where you’ll find out whether the move too far in the freedom direction will lead to good or to bad choices. If you learn your son or daughter was not quite ready for that much liberation, pulling back on the reins then is alI the harder. So the next time you decide leaving limits in place is the wiser choice, only to find out several other parents were less strict than you months before. You’re left wondering what the right answer is.

Let’s talk about it:
1) What has been evident in your child’s attitude and/or personality to provide comfort in giving more freedom or less comforting, pulling on the reins a bit?

When Do I Allow Freedom?

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Kids have to be given an increasing measure of freedom every day. They move from a crib where they live behind bars, to a “big bed” that lets them roam an entire bedroom. Once a child learns to stay in the yard, you can open the gate in the fence. They learn to look both ways when crossing the street and they can roam a neighborhood. Kids who know how to tell time and follow directions get to ride their bike to a friend’s house.

When do you loosen restrictions? Sometimes the steps toward increased freedom are driven by the government: when most kids turn sixteen, they get their driver’s license (although some states have delayed it until age seventeen). A driver’s license is hardly about driving; it’s about finding a kind of freedom real adults enjoy. But even when a clear age is defined there is still plenty of tension. Ask any parent of a new driver.

Usually, though, parents don’t get the benefit of such clear timing. We have to decide when to retreat from the limits we have imposed, and how far to move toward freedom. The process starts early. When our boys were small, we would often visit a local mall. Like most parents, we put them in strollers even after they could walk, belting them in simply to keep them in sight. They were not ready to be freed from that restriction and be cut loose in a large, potentially dangerous environment.

And yet there came a point when we had to set them free. Ten-year-olds won’t fit in strollers! Of course, once out of the stroller, they had many more choices.

Let’s talk about it:
1) What has been the hardest part about allowing freedom?
2) Some parents don’t want to simply let go the older their kids get. Where do you feel the line is between helping and enabling?