A Helping Hand with Limit Setting
What one thing could you change at home today that would instantly reduce or remove a cause of conflict?
I'm all for giving kids the opportunity to show responsibility and working together on setting limits.
But if you have an expectation that your child consistently finds hard to meet, that's a clear sign they might not be ready.
We're talking examples like:
Your 1-year-old pulling at the dog's ears.
Your preschooler getting up and down constantly when you eat out (if you can remember those days 🙃).
Your 7-year-old not giving the tablet back when screen time's over.
Your 10-year-old eating handfuls of biscuits at a time.
Limits like this where your child is faced with an expectation he/she can't yet meet - because of their age or self-regulation abilities - need a different approach if they're going to set them up to succeed rather than fail.
We know that for a limit to be successful, it needs to be enforced consistently until the child internalises it.
Enforcing limits respectfully means avoiding letting our child break the limit and then telling them off. We literally stop the behaviour from happening in the first place. It's preventative not punitive.
We can help our child learn limits positively in lots of ways, starting with questioning whether the limit really is that important to us. If it is, then either we intervene ourselves or in some cases we let the environment hold the limit for us. Either way it's about not giving our child access to that behaviour.
Let's take the restaurant example. If we decide that eating out really is a must, and our expectation is that our kid sits at the table throughout, we've got to go through a process of monitoring the meal intensely and intervening again and again until the child gets it. Stopping them from getting down or guiding them back to the table before they've got far, over and over, until it sticks.
(This is different from using threats and punishments: "If you can't sit still, we're not coming back / you can't have dessert.")
Or we could simply choose to not take them to restaurants until they're a bit older and more capable of sitting for longer. The limit is the same, just the approach is different.
Both ways are supportive and keep the responsibility with us, not them, to uphold.
Going back to the examples above and choosing to let the environment hold the limit: Separating toddler from dog for now. Only having 1 or 2 biscuits in the cupboard at any one time. Timers on tablets.
Heaven knows we need a helping hand every now and again. What's nice about working with the environment is it frees up our energy to empathise instead with our child's response to the hard limit rather than getting cross with them for breaking it.
