Helping Children Feel Safe
A group of psychologists once constructed an experiment where they built a house that was as proportional for adults as an average house is for little children. Ceilings were forty feet high, doorknobs were almost out of reach, tables and chairs were huge. They placed several adults of normal emotional stability into the house and within days they began exhibiting neurotic symptoms.
In commenting on this experiment, Rabbi Abraham Twerski notes the following: “It is reasonable to assume that a small child feels completely overwhelmed in this world built for giants. The anxiety of existing in this humongous world would be intolerable, except for the trusted intermediates who would provide a bridge between the Lilliputian child and the formidable environment... For a child to have a feeling of security, he must see these protective adults as stable, fair, wise and predictable.”
In order to negotiate the world, children require both freedom and limitations, nurturance and discipline, spontaneity and order. These seeming pairs of opposites are in fact complementary. The rhetoric of contemporary life dictates that one feed children with endless encouragement, less they suffer from low self-esteem. In principle, there is merit to always stressing the positive in a child’s efforts, but there is a tricky balance, especially in education, between endless approval and the need to tell a student when they are not succeeding and where the source of their difficulties lies.
Feeling valuable is a basic human need, so when we discipline children or demand more out of them, style is as important as substance. Done angrily, it conveys harsh judgment. Done with faith and quiet hopefulness, it communicates one’s belief in the child’s competence and fosters their own self-belief. Rabbi Twerski mentions often that when his father wanted to stress to him that a particular behaviour needed to be changed, he would reproach him with the telling Yiddish phrase “es passt nicht” - it is not worthy of you, it is unbecoming. In fostering this kind of self-respect, we allow children and students to become their own moral and intellectual monitors. No longer must we continuously enforce a kind of external “policing”; the child has already incorporated an internal yardstick of dignity and worth.
In recent years, a whole vocabulary has sprung up regarding parents who, paradoxically, feel guilty about stifling their children’s freedom, and yet also closely monitor their child’s every move, a style that at once conveys both caring and anxiety. “Helicopter” parenting focused on academic achievements while also juggling piano lessons and getting in soccer practice. More recently this was supplanted by the so called “lawn mower parent,” who goes one better than the hovering helicopter and attempts to mow down all obstacles in the child’s way.
Many contemporary parents do not want to be seen as the “strict one”, and so the appropriateness of being your child’s “friend,” of hanging out and dressing like your kids do, has become the subject of many blogs and magazine articles. According to the author and historian Stephanie Coontz, the idea that parents and children would want to be friends is a new idea: “Parents today really want their kids to be individuals — they try and shape their values and decision-making skills, but they back off from the idea that they know better what these kids should be, should do, should think,” she says. “That’s a tremendous change from most of history, when parents really did think … their kids would be safest if they obeyed them or at least followed their instructions for how to do better.”
But thinking of your mom or dad more as a friend than a parent can promote a real downside in terms of creating security for the child. Judith Smetana, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, who studies child development, observes that “at some point, the buck stops with the parents. Making sure your child stays safe and out of trouble — sometimes that means pulling rank, saying something’s not acceptable, in a way a friend probably wouldn’t or couldn’t do.”
And Berkeley psychologist Phil Cowan adds that there is a difference between authoritarian and authoritative, arguing that “sometimes the parents’ behavior is dictated more on [their] inner needs — to be loved, to be accepted, to be respected. [When] the parent says ‘I want to be best friends with my kid,’ what they really mean is, ‘I want the kid to like me.’ And the best way of getting the kid to like them, they think, is to be warm and supportive and just a peer. [But] kids are ultimately going to be warmer and more respectful if the parent is a parent.”
It’s been said often that parenting may be the hardest job on earth; it is arguably the most important. There is no perfect formula or manual, no guaranteed method. And whatever we did with one child, we may have to think and react differently with the next one. But boundary setting, and creating a stable and consistent set of expectations and consequences, is not a draconian act of repression, but the establishment of a secure and predictable world, just like the borders that are inherent in sporting events, which indicate to all of the players when something is out of bounds or not. Without those markers—in our games and in our lives--we would quickly descend into anarchy, where no actions would be better or worse than others, and therefore all acts would quickly lose meaning.
The American novelist Anne Lamott once quipped “`No’ is a complete sentence.” Sometimes limitations are the essence of freedom, allowing others to explore and discover while knowing that there are certain lines that should not be crossed. Far from creating a sense of constriction, those boundaries are the dead centre of emotional geography, because in the end, what we all want more than anything else is to feel safe.