Myth: Children need boundaries to develop healthy self-esteem
This reference is used to annotate "I would never send my kids to school" (2017) by Piotr Wozniak
Moms love convenience
According to mom blogs, discipline is important to make sure a child does not become a narcissist. The false reasoning goes like this: the opposite of discipline is indulgence. While indulgence takes away all challenges from a child's way, discipline enforces rules of which each is a little struggle, and a little opportunity. This erroneous reasoning is used to question my claim that large behavioral spaces favor developing healthy personalities.
The key error of the above reasoning is that it confuses freedom with indulgence. Freedom opens a child to multiple challenges and increases learning. Indulgence takes a way learning options by removing challenges. Indulgence may lead to a sense of entitlement indeed.
There is also a confusion between boundaries imposed by parents on kids and boundaries that everyone raises around himself in self-defense. Imposed boundaries decrease freedom and learning. Personal boundaries provide a learning opportunity in the socialization process.
There is also a confusion between boundaries imposed by parents on kids and the boundaries imposed by the world (e.g. own's life and health, freedom of others, etc.). Imposed boundaries decrease freedom and learning. Natural boundaries delineate the wide space of personal freedom.
Last but not least, the main things that kids learn from the rules are (1) the consequences of disobedience, (2) the way to fight the rules and (3) the way to circumvent the rules, incl. dishonesty. If the mom imposes a rule "baby does not touch the knife", the learning will be focused on the mom (e.g. "is she fair?, or "is she smart?"), and the rule ("can I run faster to grab the knife?" or "can I get the knife when mom is not looking?"). The most important lesson about knives may never be learned. A patient guardian might instead let the kid play with a knife with a bit of non-interfering supervision. All rational rules tried and tested in real life, a well-regulated kid will impose on herself. Nothing works better for knife safety than an actual cut (see: Value of penalties in education).
There is a one big elephant in the room here: parental convenience:
Discipline reduces learning
Krissy Pozatek is a instructor in wilderness therapy and has a great deal of experience with working with at-risk youth. Her Buddhist-inspired philosophy makes sense. However, her experience provides a skewed perspective on healthy child upbringing. It is hard to be analytical by going from a troubled teen back to his roots. An entirely different perspective emerges when observing a healthy toddler growing up in the same wilderness. Krissy's point of view (below) may provide an easy excuse for parents seeking convenience.
The aforementioned confusion between freedom and indulgence is visible in the following statement:
Culturally, the pendulum has swung from focusing on children's behavior (in previous generations) to focusing on children's emotions (today). With this, however, there has been an exponential rise in anxiety disorders in children and teens
Discipline and indulgence are similar in that they reduce the number of learning options. There is nothing wrong with focusing on behavior or emotions as long as those analyses do not lead to more "golden rules of parenting" that limit a child's freedom.
The cultural pendulum has swung primarily in the direction of overprotection and control. Indulgence is just one of the side effects.
Prefrontal lobe excuse
Children have their freedom limited, and the justification often comes from pseudoscientific excuses borrowed from Dr Phil (source):
Children have undeveloped prefrontal lobes [...] Child's brain is not fully developed, and shouldn't be given decision-making power (beyond choosing peanut butter and jelly or grilled cheese) [...] According to Child Developmental Psychologist Piaget, "magical thinking" predominates in children aged two to seven
Optimization for predictability
I explained elsewhere that optimization for predictability leads to a glass cage for a child. This can dramatically stunt development:
School-aged children from eight to eleven years of age are largely concrete in their thinking. This is why elementary kids love rules and often like the world to be black and white. After all, structure ensures predictability and security. It is only after age 12 that children begin to develop more abstract and nuanced thinking. This is why adolescence is a more appropriate time to experiment with rules and limits
I explained that kids may love rules as much as a mariner who loves the life on a ship or a prisoner who loves the predictability of prison.
Struggles improve resilience
For Pozatek, the wilderness is a good metaphor for struggles of life. Struggles improve resilience. However, when the boundaries are set in stone with authoritarian discipline, they do not lead to a healthy struggle. They lead to learned helplessness. A river can be crossed. A tree can be climbed. But rules set in stone allow of no learning beyond the awareness of the existence of the rule. If rules are invevitable and obvious (e.g. "do not kill"), they are largely neutral for self-dependence and autonomy. They are in agreement with own knowledge valuations. However, if they are pointless, misunderstood or contrary to own valuations, they add nothing to life challenges and new options to choose from:
A parent in charge knows it is not only OK for a child to struggle with a limit or a rule, it is actually good and healthy. It is OK if they have to turn off their video game to do their reading, or are asked to eat more vegetables or do an extra chore to help mom
This approach to discipline is not about climbing a mountain chosen as a desired target. It is about putting a kid in front of a vertical cliff of authority independent of the child's own opinion. Such rules do not improve resilience. They destroy resistance.
Breeding helpless generation
The above reasoning slows down development when the child is beset by the rules at the time when his learning is richest. This is a self-perpetuating problem. Instead of breeding self-dependent teens, we breed teens who require "experimenting with rules". Instead of healthy personalities, we get teens with issues with "prefrontal control" such as "impulsivity, decision making, and problem-solving, never mind all the hormonal shifts". What should be an aberration, becomes a norm. Discipline leads to breeding adults who are weak on self-reliance, and self-esteem. Those limits on freedom are the key reason why the entire school system does not work.
Pozatek's formula may work for troubled teens, but may produce more troubled teens in the first place.
She says "We all learn from struggling a bit", but that struggling is supposed to be with real life challenges of open spaces. Kids do not learn much from struggling with limits and rules. What they primarily learn from such struggles in the long run is helplessness. And this is a straight path to low self-esteem and low stress resilience. The effect opposite to the one intended.
Bad example from above
The fact that discipline serves the adult world is obvious when any room for reasoning is taken away, and replaced with a crystal clear chain of command, suitable for the army:
It's OK and perfectly appropriate for a parent's rationale to stop at this: "I am making this decision because I'm the parent, and you're the child"
The prefrontal lobe argument might be added to give this authoritarian claim a bit of scientific aura. We do not consider it perfectly appropriate to limit other people's freedom by saying "I am making this decision for you, because my IQ is higher". That claim of "being better" is the key to narcissism. The bad example comes from above. Instead of curing, we breed narcissistic behaviors.
Healthy upbringing
There is no better prevention of narcissism than good knowledge of one's own limits and strengths. A degree of arrogance and self-confidence should be welcome. However, battling narcissism by imposing limits isn't different than letting a dog know whose the boss in the house. That's a formula for a dog with low self-esteem. For an alternative view see: How to NOT Raise a Narcissist
Further reading
- Maximum spaces: Optimization of behavioral spaces in development
- Sharp boundaries: Value of penalties in education
Source
All the above excerpts come from Krissy Pozatek's article:
Quoted excerpts come from the following reference:
Title: Why It's Important To Set Healthy Boundaries With Your Kids
Author: Krissy Pozatek
Link: http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-17051/why-its-important-to-set-healthy-boundaries-with-your-kids.html