Freedom and Boundaries

                    Children test boundaries. I suppose it is part of the healthy development of the ego. Boundaries must be in place or your child will grow up thinking that there are no boundaries in life or will deal poorly with them and expect the world to give them what they want sans conditions. There are conditions however, and there must be if you wish your child to grow up being sensitive to their environment and to the needs of others. Adult temper tantrums  do not really go over very well nor are they inwardly fulfilling or beneficient to one's spirit.
           As they grow, the placement of these boundaries are tested. They need preceptual consistency. If there are no clear boundaries at home they will assume, by no fault of their own that boundaries are in general unclear with others outside of the family. They will be in for a shock as will others. This will not bode well for their relationships. Respect for others, for instance must be properly role-modeled and taught. The benefit of this is that respect for oneself is also taught as they are two sides of the same conceptual coin.
         In order for precepts to be taught, or anything for that matter it has to be consistent. Otherwise what they come away with is not the principal itself, but the 'principal of inconsistency'. The inconsistency is the thing that sticks out, not 'what' you are inconsistent 'about'. That fades to the background.
         A child has freedom within certain boundaries. If they have total freedom with no ground rules that newly forming ego and sense of self will spawn a sense of false 'entitlement' that will only hurt them and you, by default later on. This leads to a skewed view of life and the way that relationships actually work. As parents, our job in these formative years is the most important and will truly 'set the tone' for the rest of our child's life. This is likely the most influence we will ever have on the type of adult our child becomes. To me, it looks like the most important time of all.  I want serve her properly as she has enlisted me to do. I think of her person and her future. This Is my job. Her's is to be a kid and therefore she may not always like or agree with what I ask of her or sometimes deny her, and certainly does not understand it and may not for some time, but it is her well being that she has asked me to look out for--to her Future--so it is to that Future that I look in the desire that we both look back from our future, pleased.
          Parents have to learn how to apply these truths, and since there is no mandatory pre-parent exam we learn by doing, ultimately feeling and intuiting our way along. The hope is that one figures it out as best one can within the 'formative window' that is given to parents to make such things part of the bedrock of a child's psychological core concept. This is the challenge for parents: to ascertain and apply the appropriate principles in the right way, with the right insistency, and at the right time to give a new human being the fundamental tools with which to later build a happy and full adult life in the world outside.
          In the end every parent does the best they can. God bless the parents. It is a Job of jobs.


 

A Metamorphosis for Everyone

There's nothing like getting to witness, as a parent, the developing cognition of your 3 yr. old youngster. Everything about them is in full speed evolution: from their speech, to their memory, to their conceptual view of reality.
It's such a priveledge to be living it first hand, up close and personal. It's living in the camera's eye: wading through the dirty diapers, spilled juice that has since dried to the floor because you missed it due to the fact that you only have two hands and are chasing a phantom, to the very hard plastic toys constantly placed in the middle of the floor. The truth is that kids have a host of little gremlin friends that help them throughout the day. I've seen them out of the corner of my eye. Hehe. I'm now pretty well trained to have a damp face towel within 5' of wherever we happen to be for who knows what and have come to be very quick to plug my eardrums when I see a joyous shriek about to launch into the air as I care about my nervous system. As any preschool parent knows I am painting a rather rosy picture at this point.
The truth of the matter with our daughter is that she is an expressive spirit. I really don't know where she gets that. Haha. That's a blatant lie; she gets it from both sides of the gene pool. It's a double whammy. :) The gifts abound. (I say this with a smile. One must have humor or die trying to cultivate it. A parents' 'must', in particular because you're really not 'driving the bus' anymore. Nope, you aren't. Get used to it. Get over yourself. Reality Check.)
We have entered a new area of blatant ego assertion: the testing of the waters. "I am a person", says she. "I am independent of you two. Yes, you bore me, and for that I am thankful, but will you please get out of the way so that I can get to the electrical outlet? I have a glass of water and I would like to see what it looks like when it runs down the wall." She really is not, thankfully, all that intrigued by outlets, and is more interested in juice or other sticky substances for pouring out, but you get my point. You can fill in that blank with a multitude of different things. For example, Shayla loves our cat Muchkin with all the goodness and sweetness that is in the universe yet we still catch her thinking, or at least behaving that her neck is a 'handle' whereby to lift her off the ground in an expression of her exuberant love for her, nevermind that coupled with that is the fact that she doesn't know her own strength and is therefore choking her with both hands while holding her in the air. This is love, funny and scarry. We thought that we had trained her out of that one, but we were poignantly corrected on that a few days ago. There was a behavioral slip due to extreme excitement--a common occurence.
A parent's 'Job' is a formidable one. To love. To protect, Yet Allow near misses physical and non-physical in the name of exploration and freedom lest you find yourself being a rigid shrew. Caring for a being that doesn't know where the dangers are and doing it in such a way that is nigh unto invisible is like walking a tightrope blindfolded. I imagine that aspect can require even more creativity later on. "Don't 'shadow' me" they'll say. "I want to do this on my own." I see that at work even now. It reminds me of me.
How to exemplify for and shape a blossoming self indentity and world view without falling back on the comfortable out dated haunches of fear based instruction and survivalist recourse is where the Real Art and suave test of skill that every parent is unequivicably 'dragged' for happens. That's right. Down deep, under your subconscious patterns is where your mirth is distilled. It is from this place that your love glows and your life is transformed because of your child.
Everything else has place and meaning because of this: the dirty diapers, the cries of a hurt ego, the frustrations of defiance. It all takes on a golden light and gives meaning, wholeness, and peace to otherwise disparate parts of yourself. It brings you back to You and puts the spin on the Earth once again. All molecules Alive and Vibrant and Dancing.


Fear is the non-acceptance of What Is.