Setting Boundaries : Honesty In Relationship

Setting boundaries with our kiddos is tricky. We want to do right by them developmentally, socially, relationally… but it gets tough to keep all those plates spinning when we have our own humanness to juggle, too… Pretty often, our sense of duty to our child’s well-being wins out over our own needs. When our child’s well-being is truly at stake, its precedence over our own well-being is noble. But when our child is begging us to play while we’re exhausted or overwhelmed, it’s not necessarily a noble time to bump our own needs to the bottom of the list.

We are concerned about our children’s social development, about their ability to participate in friendships in ways that work for both people; and about their social-emotional development, about their ability to sustain friendships through compassion, respect, and fairness. We want to raise kids who are good friends, and adults who are good partners… But we too easily forget the way children learn relational strategies is through experience. They need to see healthy relationship modeled before they can learn to act it out themselves; and then they need to practice acting it out before they get the hang of it. One of the most important relational strategies to experience and practice is “healthy boundaries.”

For many parents I hear from, setting boundaries around play with their children can be problematic. So let’s get into this topic of Boundaries using Play and break this down:

The first rule of Healthy Boundaries is: Be honest.
When setting boundaries around play, you’ll need to be honest with your child about when, what, and how long you can play.

You're in a relationship with this person. And no relationship can be healthy without honesty. In relationships with our adult friends and partners, we know that if we are hiding our true feelings about our availability, our personal resources, our interests, what we enjoy or don’t enjoy… the relationship is already in trouble. If we want to experience healthy relationships with our children, we must be honest with them, too.

It can feel scary, even vulnerable, to start setting honest boundaries in our relationships. We imagine awkward confrontations, poor responses, uncomfortable exchanges, and impossible exits. That’s just because we haven’t seen it done enough in healthy ways. Setting boundaries doesn’t need to be awkward, it doesn’t need to illicit poor responses, doesn’t need to be vulnerable, doesn’t need to turn into confrontation. On the contrary, setting boundaries can be easy, strong, and comfortable for everyone.

I’ll show you:

You get home from work and walk through the door, and right away you hear a small voice ask you, “Will you play with me?”
You guess you’re willing to play something calm, but c’mon—you just got through the door! You need a minute to transition. So since you’re in a relationship with this small person, you’ll be straightforward about your availability:
“Sure! Let me settle in from work first, though. I need to put my stuff down and change my clothes, and then we can play something calm for about 15 minutes before I’ll need to get dinner going.”

Or let’s say you’re not willing to play right now. It’s been a terrible day. You just want to turn on a show and zone out while you make dinner. But you know once you have some time to decompress and some food in your belly, you’ll be able more available to play. As a healthy participant in this relationship with your child, you can tell them,
“You know, I’ve had a pretty rotten day, and I need some space to myself to get in a better mood. I’m going to settle in, turn something on, make dinner... and then after we eat, I’ll be ready to play with you.”

Maybe you’re working on something at home that really requires your focused attention for lengths of time. But every time you take a break, your kiddo wants to play. So then your quick breaks turn into long ones, and you always end up losing your focus for your project. Since a healthy relationship holds a space for both people to have time alone with their duties and interests, you can be honest with your child,
“I'm just coming out of the garage right now because I really had to pee, but while I'm still in this focused mood, I'm going to finish what I was working on. So I'm probably gonna spend another two hours working on this, and then when I'm done I'll come in and we can play the rest of the afternoon.”

Sometimes you don’t have enough information to be able to commit to your next play window with your kiddo, and you just have to decline their invitation without offering a raincheck. Because you’re participating in a healthy relationship with your child, it’s important to be upfront with them,
“I can't play right now, I'm right in the middle of taking care of this, and I’m not sure when I’ll have a chance to play this afternoon.”
(Stay tuned for another post about dealing with children’s feelings about your boundaries... But here’s a quick tip: Sometimes adding a cushion at the beginning and end of your answer can soothe the big feelings which lurk:
“Aw, I really wish I could! But I can’t play right now, I’m in the middle of taking care of this, and I’m not sure when I’ll have a chance to play this afternoon. But the next chance I have, we will definitely play.”)

In discussing setting personal boundaries in the context of a healthy relationship, it’s important we at least take a brief look at this broad point:
A healthy relationship requires personalized investment; that’s non-negotiable. Investment that’s personalized considers the other person’s interests, what they would enjoy, what would meet their unique needs, and fill their unique cup.
In a peer relationship, it’s important to share in each other’s interests, but in a mentorship relationship—such as parenthood or teaching—it’s not appropriate for the mentor to request the same personalized investment in return; that screws up the dynamic of the mentorship. A relationship without personalized investment cannot thrive—no healthy exceptions; and a mentoring relationship without personalized investment cannot be fully effective.
So if you notice you're declining your child’s invitations to play more often than you’re accepting them, you’ll need to examine that. You’ll need to explore the investments you’re making in your relationship with your child. And if you discover you’re not making many personalized investments in your relationship with them, you’ll need to make intentional efforts to fix that. Otherwise, you won’t have access to healthy relationship with them.

Check back later to read about:
Setting boundaries during play, and dealing with your child’s feelings about your boundaries