A Bit Strict
Do children really learn self-control through being controlled?
Illustration by Eliza Fricker (www.missingthemark.blog).
I often see ‘Good Parenting’ confused with control. It’s considered Good Parenting to have a child who will stop doing what they are doing, because you say so. It’s Good Parenting to have a child who will ask before they can eat anything, because you are the one who gets to decide. It’s Good Parenting to have a child who doesn’t resist when they are told No, who ‘listens’ and accepts without question. It’s ‘Good Parenting’ to stick to your guns for hours even when your child makes it very clear that they disagree, because ‘they have to learn.’
It's so much part of Good Parenting that when we talk about parenting that we have special euphemisms for control. ‘Strict’ we say. Or ‘ ‘Loving Boundaries’. Or ‘High Expectations’ or ‘Old school’. What would raise red flags for an adult is considered to be a good thing for a child. Parents tell themselves they are doing this because they care and in the name of love, control becomes benign.
What do they ‘have to learn’ really? That the parent is the boss, and that you have ultimate control? That what they think really doesn’t matter? That they can’t be trusted to decide what to put in their mouths? That you are the arbitrator in their life?
Learning those things are only relevant for a very short period in a person’s life. For our children will grow up, and at some point they will notice that they are being controlled. You can’t control a person for ever.
Some clear sighted children notice it sooner than others and speak up. They protest loudly and clearly from the start. Others are compliant as children, and start to notice as teenagers. We call them moody and rebellious. Still others – often the ‘high achievers’ continue on the path chosen for them into their twenties, and then start to ask themselves who is actually making the decisions in their life. They discover that they haven’t learnt how to make choices for themselves, because their guiding question in life was ‘Am I allowed to?’. Sometimes they realise they are on completely the wrong path, and it’s as if they have been sleep-walking to get there.
I think our children ‘have to learn’ far more important things than compliance. They need to learn that they are the driving force in their lives, and that they have jurisdiction over their own bodies. They need to learn how to say both yes and no. They need to learn to listen to themselves and their desires, and find out what is important to them. They need to learn to question what they are told, for obedience makes you vulnerable to exploitation. You can’t assume that someone has your best interests at heart, just because they sound like they know best.
These things are hard to learn, and children make lots of mistakes along the way. It’s tempting to think we can skip those errors if we control them effectively. We can skip straight to the age of considered decision making and maturity. But we can’t help our children learn self-control by controlling them. They need practice at making decisions, good and bad, and at finding their own limits. Including getting it wrong.
Our role as parents is to create and curate a safe space for them, and then to let them explore and discover. We’re there alongside them, a partner but not a puppet master.
Children learn self-control through practice in controlling themselves, not through being controlled.
This is so true.
As an Autistic parent (to three Autistic kiddos), sadly, it took me into my late-20s/early-30s to finally learn a little self-control after having two rather controlling parental forces in my childhood and even into early adulthood—my live-in paternal grandmother and my father. My father took his lack of self-control out on my brother and I as his mother still "ruled the roost," it seems, to this day. He's never left her side. That realization—although "sweet" of him, depending on how you look at it—that his devotion to his mother as if she were a deity of kindness and not of control really opened my eyes to how I was parenting my own children. They're all sharp and question authority. It served as an earlier wake-up call in my late 20s when I had a toddler asking, "Why should I?" Not simply the curious, often repetitive, *why, why, whys* we can get from children: "Why *should* I?"
I had to answer the question for myself first, and I couldn't. I was just on parenting autopilot, letting history repeat itself. At first, it felt like disrespect from my kids, but when I took a step back, I saw three incredibly smart and thoughtful young people trying to figure things out for themselves. And them questioning authority was and is a gift I didn't realize I needed as a parent just as much as they needed the space to explore it as children. (I only questioned religion, and I'm just now realizing I felt like I had the space to because my family used to just drop us off at church, leave, and pick us up when it was over. Hmm.)
It's so nice to have a teen and pre-teens who speak up for themselves.
I still catch myself from time-to-time, slipping back into moments of wanting control, or rigid thinking patterns. But that's a "me-problem." I'm not trying to control *them,* I'm trying to control my chaotic environment that creates too much stimulation for my nervous system.
I regularly communicate with my kids that I'm learning things in my 30s that they got access to as children, and I apologize definitively. And mean it.
I'm grateful for the thoughtfulness, mindfulness, and greater access to information offered to us modern-day parents. I forgive my parents for not having access to the kind of information that could've made life better, or simply more fluid-feeling for us. And I recognize that coming from a family of neurodivergent people, we were always going to experience greater communication challenges and more. For my parents, having compliant kids meant they were doing things right, and they could be seen as "normal"—they could be a part of the "Parents Tribe" because clearly they were doing something well.
Thank you for this post. 💝 It's served as a mirror, and a reminder that I'm still trying and doing my best with and for my family. I'm going to make mistakes, but we're raising future adults, not robots.
Yes - but freedom has to be balanced with boundaries; "I want to watch TV all day", "I only want to eat junk food" and "I don't want to go to school" aren't choices we can responsibly allow our children to make.
And I know this from my own child - we set out with the best intentions along the lines of the above, and were the opposite of controlling, but then being burdened with too many choices at too young an age led to anxiety, especially as those choices often resulted in too much or inappropriate screen time.
A child that gets their own way all the time at home also becomes entitled and unable to resolve disagreements in the wider world, resorting to tantrums, name calling and sometimes threats or violence. We only need to look at behaviour on social media to see this becoming more of a problem.
There are rules and guidelines that control us all in the adult world - we need to set our children similarly responsible boundaries and be willing to enforce them, without trying to control too much.