Let’s start with an important, basic rule when setting limits:
Don’t set a limit if you’re not ready to follow through.
If you don’t follow through, your child learns to distrust what you say. You will lose your credibility, and your kid may act as if he doesn’t respect your authority. In reality, it’s not that he doesn’t take you seriously; he’s only following your lead because, to him, it seems like you don’t take yourself seriously!
Think of it this way: your kid’s job is to figure out where the limits are. But this isn’t just an intellectual exercise for him; it’s linked to his feelings. When he knows there are clear limits, he knows he’s safe because someone is in charge: someone is flying the plane he’s on.
So, what’s really going on when parents find that they have trouble following through? It’s a common issue and it often comes down to our own experience as a child and the feelings that come up for us when we’re faced with following through.
What does “following through” really mean?
Following through simply means that you impose consequences when your kid exceeds a limit you set. If he won’t put down your phone to play with his friend, you take the phone away. If he takes too long to get into his PJs, then the following night his book time will be shortened to allow more time to get into PJs. Intellectually, this isn’t complicated, but if you’re finding yourself hedging away from following through, the issue has its roots in your feelings.
With this in mind, the question above should really read:
What emotions does “following though” provoke in you?
For many parents, following through means making their kid mad or sad. It means having to deal with the fallout of following through. It probably means conflict and all the emotions that come with conflict. It means that your kid will have some Big Feelings and you’ll have to deal with those.
But you, too, might have some big feelings. For you, following through might mean feeling like a bad, mean, punishing, restrictive, not-fun, tough parent. Especially when your child yells things like, “I hate you,” or “I want to go to Dad’s house. He’s nicer!”
You may have your own past that muddies your thinking. For example, people who were raised by harsh or abusive parents often avoid parenting in any way that resembles their own parents. In this case, following through might feel harsh or abusive.
Similarly, parents who themselves had very restrictive parents may overcompensate for this by being overly lenient, as if following through might make them as restrictive as their own parents.
Keep in mind that it’s very easy to overcompensate for your own childhood experiences that felt too intense or overwhelming. This is a normal reaction in which parents try to adjust for their own childhood experiences, but tend to over-adjust and go too far in the opposite direction.
The big fear: Conflict
For most parents who have trouble following through, it’s often related to a fear of conflict. Under this fear lies a bigger fear, because any time two people have conflict, their relationship is challenged. With a parent and child, conflict can threaten the all-important connection between them.
In this case, when we’re scared to set limits, we’re really scared that our connectedness won’t survive. Will our child get furious at us and still love us? Will we be able to tolerate our child’s anger, especially when he says hurtful things to us, like “I hope you die”? Will we be able to control our own anger so that it doesn’t negate our love towards our child? (I know, anger doesn’t destroy love; we can be angry at our kid and still love her, but sometimes it feels like the anger has destroyed our love.)
It comes back to your relationship to conflict and whether you think your connection to your kid can survive it. If you avoid conflict because your childhood taught you that conflict only brings loss or terror or danger, then it makes sense that the child part of you still fears conflict.
But what does your intellectual, grownup part of you think about conflict? What does it think will happen when your child gets mad at you? Will she abandon you? Will the two of you be able to get past the immediate emotions and reconnect?
If you’re not sure, just know that no child will abandon her parent, and that every kid will seek out connection once her emotions settle down.
The take away
If you’re having trouble following through on the limits you set, the issue is not an intellectual one; it’s an emotional one—just like most issues! And like just about every emotional issue, the roots stem from your own early childhood experiences.
You can break the cycle of your own past by getting in touch with these feelings and separating what happened back then from what’s happening now. The way you dealt with the past made sense at the time, especially considering you were a child and this was the best way to survive. But you’re different now. You’re older, wiser, smarter, more adept—more everything!—and your ghosts of the past don’t have to dominate. The old way of coping doesn’t need to be your current way.
Be kind to yourself as you consider where you come from. Give yourself time to consider it all, and time to let it go, and remind yourself where you are now.
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