How do I set the right boundaries? My daughter Kayle is almost three years old and practically running my life. I don’t want to give in to every whim and little temper tantrum of hers and I also don’t want to stifle the development of her will and self-esteem. Help!
When you think of the many times when you had just the right balance of authority and surrender, what were the ingredients of those moments? Did you have ample time and no other commitments? Did Kayle have a good afternoon nap? Was the sand at the beach just the right temperature? Were you, as far as you could see aligned inside and a relaxed power could flow through you? Did you enter into her world and let her guide you into her perceptions and awe?
The fact that these moments happen is what makes parenting so magical. It seems all the more desolate when all that is left is a power struggle. Why can’t it be an easy flow all the time?
I once heard one of my teachers say, ‘Bad weather is very important weather’. Parenting is a spiritual journey. It is in the pressure of resistance where new avenues open up. As Lewis Thomas in his article ‘To err is human’ puts it: ‘Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand.
With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing, there is an amiable understanding that one is right and the other is wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency towards error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments. The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all their good side, never make mistakes. Fish are flawless in everything they do. It’s through the ability to make mistakes us humans can find ourselves on new levels, stunned, out in the clear, ready to move again.’
We are not supposed to be flawless parents. Our children would miss out on learning a major avenue of human creativity if we were. Kayle is fully aware of the inner pathways of trial and error you go through, when she wants to take her clothes off to go into the swimming pool just as you were getting ready to leave to meet a friend. Is it really important that she has a swim now or is it more right for you to be on time for your friend? She is so tuned into you, she can sense the fact that you are struggling to find the right inner alignment for which action to take, surrender or force. What you decide is not so relevant. The learning for both of you lies in your capacity to encompass the whole situation and make a decision. Even if you make the ‘wrong’ decision, too lenient or too forceful, it ultimately doesn’t matter. I am not suggesting for you to be sloppy. The more precise your inner alignment the more of an art your life becomes. I am just saying that you need to be off sometimes to go deeper and become new and fresh again.
There is really no need to worry about whether you are stifling Kayle’s self-esteem and will or whether you are letting her become a little monster, if your focus is on being available to life, here, now, letting it have all of you. If that is your total commitment you strengthen your ability to be still amidst it all and be moved by the intelligence that is inherent in everything. A relaxed power can then manifest itself through you. The gap between trial and error becomes a delightful creative force.
