So many times in my office I hear a child, often a teenager, upset about the rules their parents make. Sometimes they act like their parents are such a pain to them. I don’t always disagree with the specific arguments the child is making, but as I look at the anguish on the parents’ faces, as a parent myself, one thought re-occurs to me over and over again. The fact that the child is reacting toward their parents with so much distaste, and the fact that their own view brooks no compassion for their parents’ angst, certainly means at least one thing. They have no idea how much their parents love them.
It is the rare parent who is able to keep in mind just how much it's true that love is really a very one-way process between parents and children. But if I want to be honest about it myself, I have to admit that I had no idea how much my parents loved me until I had children of my own. On a daily basis, however, because I love my children so much, it is relatively automatic for me to assume that my children love me in return to that very same level. My love for my own parents, however, grew so tremendously after my children were born that I know it really doesn't work that way at all. If you assume your children love you as much as you love them, you are unfortunately going to be at a significant disadvantage in every argument you have with them.
It is natural for children to get what they can. They do so in the context of loving their family but, if they are normal, they are thinking far more of themselves most of the time than they are of us. In fact, that is their job. They are attempting to grow, with us parents in the roles of earth, nutrients, and sun. Simply stated, they need us. That's not exactly the same as love. So it only makes sense that we love them far more than they love us. We constantly think of sacrifice for them without even thinking of it as sacrifice, while they often don’t even notice what we do. In fact, all of this fits very nicely into nature and evolution from a survival perspective. In order to grow, children must experiment with things and branch out. If they are too fearful, they will not gain adequate experience through healthy discovery. In fact, the child-adolescent fore-brain is not even sufficiently developed for being truly careful and future oriented. In contrast, parents are supposed to protect their genetic "line" for generations. Thus, they need their children to grow up well, be successful, and become good parents themselves. Within that context, children try to branch out while parents simultaneously attempt to make that branching safe and auspicious, sometimes by way of painful pruning. This relationship between branching and pruning can create extreme tension that all too often morphs into significant conflict.
This is what children really don’t understand. It is our protective love, our pruning so to speak, that makes us react to them in ways they do not like. When we make rules, we do so, of course, because we aim to make them safe. Even when we behave in controlling ways, typically we are doing so because we are so scared of what could happen to our precious babies if they were allowed to use, what we believe to be, poor judgment. We are desperate to keep them safe. Seeing them in pain, or failing, brings us so much excruciating pain, it's as if the pain we see in them is our own. We are incessantly and exasperatingly focused on their future. We want an insurance policy for their success and happiness, but our vigilant diligence is the only insurance we can get. They have no idea how much we love them, and it's our gargantuan love that makes them hate us.
In that vein, I will write the rest of this article as though I am talking to the child who doesn’t understand why his or her parents are being so "hard," or making so many rules, or why they are limiting behavior they think is dangerous. Feel free to share this article with your children. Meanwhile, keep in mind, there is a natural tension between their need to gain experience and your need to make them safe. They may not understand just how much we love them, or even how we can't help but try to guide them adequately, but maybe we can benefit, too, from knowing that they have to do what they do, too.
To The Child Who Wants to Know Why Parents Make So Many Rules
You really really don’t understand how much your parents love you. I’m sorry, but you don’t. And you can’t because you have not yet had children of your own. Now I am not saying that your parents are always right. Please don’t think that’s what I think. I am a parent, and I am often wrong. But most of the time when I am wrong about what I want from my children or about what I say to my children, it happens because I love them so much, and not because of what I need for me.
Have you ever thought about how much time your parents spend doing things so your needs will be met? I am not just talking about how they go to work each day. In fact you could easily argue that they do that for themselves, or to uphold some image, or because that’s how they view their roles. No, I'm not just talking about their work. What I am really talking about is how often they cook for you, clean up after you, work on your homework with you, take you where you want to go, think about what you’ll need for school, or what you’ll need to feel good when with your friends. If you are willing to think about it, in fact, if we take your parents work days completely out of the equation (even though it's true that they do that partially for you, too), you can see that they spend at least 1/2 of all their non-work time doing something for you, or your siblings, or for taking care of the home you share with them.
On the other hand, have you noticed that they don’t expect anything like that from you? Yes, they expect you to do your homework. In fact they even make you do it sometimes which, believe it or not, is far harder than just letting you do what you want. Yes, sometimes they make you do some jobs around the house too, which, believe it or not, is mostly harder than just doing it themselves. And yes, sometimes they get mad at you about silly things that you just don’t understand. But can you say that they expect you to do anywhere near as much as they do? Do you spend 1/2 of your free time doing something for them or the home? If you do, your parents are probably not complaining about you, and they probably don't think of you as someone who needs a lot of extra rules.
The question then is, why do they do so much for you? And why do they care so much about what you’re doing? From your point of view it probably doesn’t even make sense. Sometimes it probably seems like they spend almost all their time thinking about you. In fact, they seem to notice everything about you. This is so much true that sometimes it makes you sick. Right? You just wish they wouldn’t notice so much. It’s weird how your mom always seems to know what you’re up to. She knows your mood better than you do sometimes (even though you tell her she’s wrong when she says she knows your upset). Without even looking, your dad knows which of you or your siblings enters a room. Right?
The reason they care so much is complicated. It has something to do with how much time they have already put into you. You wouldn’t believe what it was like in the early years before you can remember - diapers, constant crying, making sure there was always a warm bottle, all that whining, and all the stuff you got into and messed with all the time – wow, what a pain!!! It also has something to do with how much their parents put into them. Finally, it seems to have something to do with instinct. Although there are many reasons that your parents care so much, one thing is for sure, it has nothing to do with just wanting to make your life miserable.
For whatever reason, your parents care so much about you, it’s almost as though you are a vital organ of their own bodies. It’s like you’re a second heart, and if something happens to you, your parents feel like they themselves will die. What’s even worse than you being like a second heart, though, is that you are not inside their bodies. If you were inside their bodies, they would be able to keep you protected by carrying you everywhere (that’s probably what they’d really like to do). As it is, however, your parents view you as though you're that heart, but instead of being safely in their chests, you’re laying out in the middle of a highway somewhere with nothing but those stupid orange cones placed around you for protection. Those flimsy cones, haphazardly strewn about you, are how most parents think about the quality of their kids' judgment. Without their guidance, those cones are your parents' only hope for protecting you from the multitudinous variety of cars and trucks whipping by, any one of them at any moment, with just a minor nudge at the wheel or a gust of wind, ready to smash you lifeless into the pavement. Your parents are clinging desperately to the idea that they will be able to guide you unharmed through the dangers of life so you’ll survive and prosper, but they perceive you to be so vulnerable that sometimes you think their protective actions are evidence of their desire to completely control you. The fact is that your parents are scared out of their minds about something happening to you, and about your future, because they love you so extremely and intensely.
Although they might seem like a pain sometimes, there are many great benefits of your parents’ gargantuan love for you, but I want to tell you two benefits that will likely surprise you. If you start to try to recognize how your parents love for you is their primary motivation, then these two things will happen.
First, when arguing with your parents, you will not be able to be so angry at them because you will see that they are not your enemy. In fact, if you look at it correctly, they are for you, on your side, and thinking only of your safety and proper guidance. If you don't agree with them, you must see that they are not against you. Rather, they are merely misguided and in need of information about how you really do have your own best interests in mind. If you see that your parents are not against you, but are merely misguided, you will not act angry and you will have a much better chance of benefiting from the second benefit.
The second benefit, believe it or not, comes from the fact that you do recognize your parents love for you. That is, if you verbalize your understanding of how your parents’ motivation in guiding you is the motivation and/or intention behind their perspective, they are far more likely to listen to your perspective. If you are, in fact, correct in your point of view, if you want your parents to listen to you, the first thing you must do is figure out how their point of view is related to your welfare. Then, simply tell your parents specifically how you know their perspective is related to your welfare, and proceed to tell them how your point of view takes your welfare into account just as much as theirs (if your point of view does not take your welfare into account, you might as well just give it up because they will not give in). Verbalizing your understanding of your parents’ perspective is a convincing and promising strategy for you that does not include you being disgusted with them. You see, because your parents love you more than you could ever know, they are also going to give you exactly what you want as long as what you want makes them feel like your getting what is in your best interests. They can't help it. Their only motivation is to see everything work out beautifully for you. If what you want will make your future bright and will pose no danger, then what you want is what they want too.
So you see, all you have to do, if you really want to get what you want, is truly want what’s best for you. If you can do that, and you can explain why it's best for you to your parents, you’ll typically get what you want. And maybe you’ll get one step closer to understanding something that it also took me a long to recognize. There's nothing you can do about how much your parents love you. I know it's a pain, but you're just going to have to deal with it. But even though your parents will never stop loving you (more than you could ever know), and even though that's really a big pain, at least you can recognize that they're only trying to do their very best for you, and yes, sometimes they'll even control you, just because they truly, deeply love you.
