Study 2 (Chapters 2 and 3) "Kids Need Parents With Boundaries"

We mostly focused on Chapter 2 for this study, "Kids Need Parents With Boundaries."  The main points covered were:

• Consider how your kids' behavior is a response to their environment, of which parents are a big part.
• Think about the face that boundaries are more caught than taught.
• Look at three ways that parents can influence their kids to develop boundaries by teaching, by modeling, and by helping kids internalize healthy boundaries.
• Acknowledge that part of the challenge of teaching kids boundaries is tolerating and enduring your child's hatred of your boundaires.
• Recognize five obstacles to teaching kids boundaries:  depending on the child, overidentifying with the child, thinking that love and seperateness are enemies, ignoring and zapping and being worn down.

Our questions and discussion focused on the five obstacles too boundary training: 

• Depending on the Child:  As your child's major source of love, you provide the closeness, intimacy and nurture that sustains her.  Yet this closeness can become confused with a parent's need for the child.  This is called dependency. (p46)  
• Overidentifying With the Child: Children need their parents to empathize with their pain, fear and loneliness.  But some parent's confuse their own painful feelings with the child's and project their problems onto the child. (p48)
• Thinking Love and Seperateness are Enemies:  Disagreeing, confronting, or simply being different from your children does not indicate a break in the connection.  Structuring and being seperate from the child are not the same as a loss of love. (p49)
• Ignoring and Zapping: Ignoring and zapping teaches a child that he can persist in doing whatever he wants.  By ignoring inappropriate behavior and not addressing things as they happen, he learns he can get away with murder nine times out of ten.  (p50)
• Being Worn Down: Kids work us and work us and work us.  It is scary how they sense when we are weak and ready to give in to them.  Take a moment to consider why your child may be wearing you down.   (p51) 

The thing we all seemed to relate to the most was "ignoring and zapping."  This is where you are patient and tolerate your child over and over until you reach your limit, snap and "zap" them!  What really stuck out to me about this is when it said the child knows that nine times out of ten they will get away with the behavior so the risk is worth it to them!  How many times do our kids outsmart us?  We just have to be stronger then them one time and they will eventually learn not to take the risk because they know the outcome will be consistent.

This was a brief recap of our last discussion.  Now that we are caught up, I'll provide more of the dicussion questions and activities during the week that we are off!