Boundaries

In between “yes” and “no,” I also offer the option of “maybe.”  The in-between place is where our desires are not yet clear or known. 

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On Children

by Khalil Gibran

Your children are not your children.

They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls’ dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable

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Parents honor the separateness and uniqueness of the Child and Child Self through boundaries, which enable the True Self to evolve in trust and safety. Yet, for many of us, adults violated or disregarded our boundaries in ways that were damaging and, at times, severely so. When adults do not give children appropriate boundaries, children do not learn to attend to their own needs and desires, protect themselves, or understand where their needs begin and someone else’s ends. The Child and Child Self do not learn that they have the right to say “yes” or “no.”

When my Child Self and my Child are faced with a choice, I say: 

“Little one, you can say 'yes', or you can say 'no thank you' and, if necessary, you can say 'NO.'" 

I want them to know they have the right to claim what they need and want. 

In between “yes” and “no,” I also offer the option of “maybe.”  The in-between place is where our desires are not yet clear or known. My Child or Child Self may know what they want but are challenged by a new experience, an old habit, or a disturbing thought, and may not be prepared to say “yes” or “no.” When I offer “maybe” as a choice, I create a boundary for them and another for me. As the adult, I can pause to separate from my own attachment to the Child’s choice and support the Child or Child Self. A pause does not interfere or push a decision.  

A parent once told me that she had trouble giving her daughter a choice about whether to accept a friend’s repeated invitations for a play date that her daughter consistently had declined. The mother did not want her child to hurt this friend’s feelings, likely because of an injury to the mother’s own Child Self, and pushed her to have a playdate. The mother was overly invested in her child’s choice when the choice was clearly her daughters. Even though the mother didn’t force the child to have a playdate, she made her daughter feel that there was something wrong with what she wanted. Had the mother been conscious of this as being her own issue, she would have been able to honor the child’s choice and boundaries.  

Physical Boundaries

Giving children the right to their own physical space is empowering. When I began to study Montessori education, I was struck by the practice of giving children, as young as two, small mats to carry to a place of their choice on the floor. This marked their space. The children would choose their toys and activities and bring them to their mats to organize and play with. They learned that they had the right to say, “This is my space, please don’t come in.” Or, conversely, “Come on in, this is my space and I want you here.” And when play was done, the children returned everything to its place. Given this permission, children learn to take responsibility for their own boundaries. This is a form of protective self-love. 

Try saying this to the Child or Child Self: 

“Here is your space, it’s yours. I am over here out of your way, but close by.” 

In doing this, you are providing stability and assuring them that you will respect their boundaries. In other words, you are acknowledging where you end and the Child or the Child Self begins.

I love telling parents to “get out of their children’s underwear drawer.”  Soon after children can go to the bathroom independently, it is literally important for them to take charge of their own underwear. And this expression is an excellent metaphor about respecting our children’s boundaries, extending beyond the toilet. 

The boundaries we give our children must respect their bodies and psyches. As they grow, our children’s “private parts” as well as the “private places in their minds” are not our business. We need to set our egos aside and respect that. When we’re not sure whether we’re crossing a line, we can ask ourselves: “Am I going into my Child’s underwear drawer?” 

For the Child Self, we can claim our right to privacy—a right we may not have been taught was ours. This is an act of self-love. It is never about shaming. Rather, it is about releasing our Child Self from the shame she experienced when young. 

Emotional Boundaries

Along with physical boundaries, we must create emotional boundaries for the Child and the Child Self. Unfortunately, again, we may not have experienced such boundaries as children. In this case, our Child Self needs to know that the lack of boundaries she feels now is from her past. We can reassure the Child Self that her feelings are real but are not about what is happening in the present. 

In general, little boys are expressly or implicitly told that it is not okay to experience certain feelings. Sadness, for example, can be articulated but crying and expressing mournful feelings is often discouraged. When a man finds himself experiencing deep sadness in the present, the shame he may feel, the need to cut off from and protect his feelings, originates from the lessons of his culture. To care for the Child Self in such situations, it’s important to separate our adult responses and feelings from the Child Self so that we can choose a clearer path to the True Self, to what we really feel. 

We can say to the Child Self:  

“Little one, you are sad, it is okay to be sad. I am not sure that sadness is what I truly feel right now, but I see myself as a child, not being given permission to be sad and I am here to tell you it’s okay."

The tricky part is being able to separate your response to a Child you are raising from what the Child Self feels or believes about feelings. 

Try this inner way of discerning what is yours and what belongs to the Child or the Child Self. 

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It Is Not About Me

It is not about me

if the flowers bloom 

or the air gets clean

or the water is purified by flowing through silt.

It’s not about me if armies put down weapons

or my best friend stops fearing emotional attachment.

It’s not about me if my brother makes his music 

or my son can’t find a friend. 

It’s not about me if my mother is depressed, 

or my father rages

It is just not about me. 

What is not about you?

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When children suffer from experiencing a lack of boundaries, they may believe that they are responsible for things that they have no control over. 

When my mother cried because I was in pain, this is what I understood: “I made my mother cry, it must be my fault.” I did not get that her tears were about my experience of pain.

Boundaries would have helped me understand where I began, and my mother ended. My mother could have said this to me:

“Everyone gets sad, honey, it is not your fault. And it is not your job to make me or anyone else happy. You love me, I love you. When you are sad, I will listen. I will take care of you, that’s my job. When I am sad, I will take care of myself, get help from friends or my partner, but I won’t hide sadness because that is not healthy for us. Everybody gets sad.”

Think of the child who believes that they are responsible for their parents’ divorce. It is not uncommon for children to feel this way, to think that they are at fault, that they could have been a better person and the parents would not have divorced. There is shame in these feelings and a belief that “there is something wrong with me.” When children grow up without clear boundaries, they may trade their own health and well-being to satisfy the needs and desires of others. Or, when someone chooses not to accept their love, they may believe that they deserve to be rejected. The depth of these feelings can make it hard to separate what is and is not “about me.”

Even small degrees of conscious boundary-setting between adults and children help children make these distinctions. Each degree of separation between what we feel and our Child feels or what our Child Self is re-experiencing helps our Adult Selves clarify what we need and want. Because humans are bound together in this existence, others’ feelings matter profoundly. Boundaries help us clarify where we connect with each other and where we separate.  

While teaching our children how to respect their own boundaries, we also need to gently teach them how to respect those of others. 

We can say to the Child and the Child Self: 

“Go ahead, get wild, get creative, get into it. And remember, do no harm.” 

As a teacher, I encouraged all forms of exploration in my classroom when the boundary of “do no harm” was in place. I have trained many teachers to ask themselves if the child is harming another (e.g., drumming on someone else’s head with their blocks) or harming materials or property (e.g., breaking, writing on, or destroying it for future use).  If so, the adult needs to set appropriate boundaries, preferably with choices, alternatives, and creative distractions. For example, you might say to the child, “You may build with those blocks, but not write on them, here is paper for coloring.” In my teacher training workshops, I spend hours on this topic alone. 

The most challenging question is deciding whether children are harming themselves. This is where nuance lies. The best answer requires the Adult to observe without judgment or prejudice. Remember, our goal is to create boundaries that allow for freedom, but not injury. For instance, if the Child is playing randomly with blocks and you believe they should be sorted by size, the question becomes: does this child “need” the boundary of order or are they best served by the freedom to explore the disarray? While we, as adults, may have our own preference, we need to observe the Child without a preconceived notion of the “right” choice and then decide on the best course of action that will serve the Child.  

In making these decisions, we need to pay attention to whether our Child Self is triggered by our own unmet needs or lack of boundaries. When this happens, we must listen and honor the Child Self for what it did not get. It can be difficult, however, to know what boundaries we need to set, if the adults in our lives failed to provide us with boundaries based on our needs, rather than their prejudgments. 

When I was a child, I wished an adult had asked me what I needed when I was overflowing and, at times, overwhelmed with all my creative ideas and projects, without their judgments in the mix. For example, an adult might have asked: “Little one, you have so many ideas, that is so exciting, may I help you decide what to do first, it may feel better to do that?  This is better than “you need to finish something before you start something else.” This would have helped me sort out what I wanted to do most and what could wait. 

Media and Invasive Media

In contemporary life, parents are called upon to navigate and make decisions about the pervasive presence of screen activities and social media for their children as well as for themselves. As we do this, our Adult Selves must be conscious of how such decisions were made for us as children and how that affects our Child Selves today. Media can be too intense, invasive, and even abusive when it is developmentally inappropriate or psychologically disturbing and, as a result, can be damaging in permanent ways. 

For the children we raise, parents need to set loving boundaries for children of every age—when to turn off screens, silence phones, and engage in conversation. We make these choices based on our own moral compasses and beliefs about what is right. In doing this, however, it is important to avoid a couple of common pitfalls. First, when our beliefs are based on what we think we should do or what others think, we should pause. We need to trust what feels right to us based on the needs of our Child. These feelings outweigh statistical data, logic, or linear thinking. Second, we need to notice the needs of the Child Self. Are we choosing boundaries that adults made for us that caused us injury or that we are rebelling against or that helped us? Here our Child Self may be the best guide. 

For the Child Self, tend carefully. Our Adult Self may be comfortable with media that is not right for the Child Self. If so, our adult preferences should take a back seat to the Child Self’s needs, which may show up as physical symptoms, such as loss of sleep, exhaustion, short temperedness, and lack of energy. We need to listen to these symptoms. For example, we may serve the Child Self with a boundary that says: “I got this, I am the adult, and Little One, whatever is being set off I am here to tend to it.”

When we provide appropriate boundaries to our Child and Child Self, we let them know that the adult is in charge, that they are safe and seen. The trust in the Adult Self will grow along with the awareness of what their own true needs and desires are.