Kiddipedia
Handing your child a device and attempting to have boundaries around its use, when you have never had any boundaries with your child, will end the same as using a chocolate teapot.
Limit setting and creating appropriate boundaries can be some of the most difficult aspects of the parenting journey.
Children need structure and predictability in their lives. In an ideal world, the parent structures the day based on the needs of the child and the family as a whole. Within that structure there needs to be room for play, fun and spontaneity. Healthy limit setting allows children to feel safe and secure. When a situation or event becomes unpredictable, it is usually met with a level of acting out from the child. When we don’t set clear limits, we often feel as if our children are constantly violating our boundaries.
Are we able to hold a boundary with ourselves, and what are we modelling? (This is a conversation for another day)
When exploring boundaries, we first need to ask ourselves, is this boundary life-affirming? The following are examples of life-affirming boundaries as found in Dr Shefali Tsabary’s book The Awakened Family
- looking after my body with good food/sleep and hygiene
- looking after my environment with a tidy room and home
- looking after my development with education be it formal or informal
- looking after my mental health by connection to family and community.
Or is the boundary ego enhancing, ‘nice to have’; tennis lessons, ballet classes, learning how to play the flute. It is here that we need to ask ourselves, is this need to push the activity serving my own ego, or is it genuinely coming from the needs of the child?
The second aspect to setting boundaries is in considering whether the boundary is a firm boundary, non-negotiable ‘set in stone’ or is this a negotiable boundary, ‘set in sand’.
We need to physically and energetically believe in the boundary we have set. Either there is a boundary or there isn’t. Our actions need to match our words. Children pick up on our inconsistencies and will act appropriately, which is to test us to see if we know what we are talking about, if we truly feel and believe what we are saying. We need to ‘walk the walk as well as talk the talk’, otherwise our children will see straight through us and it will be difficult to recreate the same boundary.
How often have you created a boundary that you were sure was set in stone only to have it crumble to sand.
Once we have decided to create a boundary that we have concluded is in the child’s best interest, (for example limiting screen time to 30minutes after homework) we need to communicate this limit with our children with kindness and compassion while staying firmly rooted in the present moment. It’s important to hold the limit with consistency and with empathy, our kids are enjoying themselves and want more (don’t we all want MORE when we are enjoying ourselves!).
It’s important to involve our children in the decision-making process, so that if the agreement is broken, they know that screens will be removed from the equation. Involving children in the decision-making process enables them to feel empowered to make decisions that directly affect themselves (we all want a sense of autonomy in our lives).
Your role as a parent is to decide what your boundaries around your child’s device usage are. Is the boundary life enhancing vs ego enhancing, negotiable vs non-negotiable? You need to truly believe and embody this when discussing the limits and boundaries with your child and remain calm.
At the end of the day, our children are asking us to set limits with loving kindness. They want us to have patience with them as they learn it, and most importantly show them empathy and forgiveness when they cross the line, which they invariably will. We are raising children, not robots.
Hi, I’m Faith Hobson—a devoted mother of two boys, Child Health Nurse, Certified Sleep Consultant Informed Trauma Coach, Conscious Parent Coaching, Mindfulness and Meditation teacher.
Through the culmination of my experiences, I’ve given rise to Parenting Revolution Coaching—an innovative and highly effective approach aimed at assisting parents in nurturing happy, healthy, and thriving children from birth to teenagers and all the challenges in between.
