Woe to the next person who tells me my ND kids just need boundaries. A pox on their house! Surely a pox would be more gentle than the serrated edge of my wrath.
Being told “Kids need boundaries” gives me the absolute shits. Not just the shits though, perhaps the most violent diarrhea of any parenting advice I’ve received.
Partly because it’s actually good advice. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just not right either. At least not the way you mean it.
“Kids need boundaries” gets tossed around all the time, with a knowing nod and a sagely furrowed brow, but especially when my kids are behaving in a way that offends someone’s adult sensibilities. In other words, they’re behaving like kids. More specifically, like neurodivergent kids, because that’s what they are.
Little walking, screeching chaos machines. And it’s a lot, I get it. Believe me, I get it more than anyone.
It’s the worst when someone whips out an unsolicited “kids need boundaries” when I’m just having a whinge about how fucking hard it is to be a parent of kids with extra support needs, and unique support needs of my own. As though with those three words of astounding wisdom, all our brains magically re-wire themselves into a less challenging configuration.
Bonus dick-pic energy if the speaker has no children of their own.
“…when people say “kids need boundaries,” what they really mean is “kids need to be controlled.” And if the kids in question don’t submit to being controlled, then the implication is that their parents should shame and punish them. And multiple studies have shown that shame and punishment don’t produce lasting behavioral changes. What they do produce is trauma.”
Sure, kids need boundaries but do you know why?
Kids need boundaries as a way of knowing that their caregiver will keep them safe, through the roil and toss of their emotions during a storm.
They need to know that their caregiver will guide them though the unfamiliar and often cruel and confusing territory of society, especially when that society is built for a different sort of brain or body than their own.
They need to know that despite it all, there will be always be safe hand to take theirs, safe arms to hold them.
From a neuroscientific and developmental perspective, healthy boundaries are a scaffold upon which safety, trust, connection, and eventually independence are built.
A healthy boundary says “I am going to hold this space for you to safely and securely explore your place in the world. Even though your feelings feel too big for you to carry, I’ve got you.”
But when people say “kids need boundaries” what they really mean is “Reel in your feral goblin spawn because I don’t approve of their behavior.”
“And by the way, I also think you’re a bad parent.”
This expectation around parents holing inflexible boundaries around their children’s behavior is based on an outdated (and abusive) authoritarian parenting paradigm.
It’s a close relative of “I was spanked and I turned out fine,” and it’s severe mothball-scented predecessor with liver-spotted lips, “Children should be seen and not heard.”
The current science on child development has shown these systems of coercive control that appealed to an unrealistic ideal from last century to be not only ineffective, but deeply harmful.
When these folks say “Kids need boundaries”, what I hear underneath the words is whiskey-hot breath and the rasp of a belt being drawn through the loops, “kids need to learn their place.”
Of course that’s not what they really mean when they say it, but you know what rear view mirrors say about objects being closer than they appear.
The scariest thing is that boundaries around a kid’s behavior cannot exist without the threat of enforcement.
But you can’t make kids do things they don’t want to do. You can’t. (If you’ve ever had a baby who “just won’t sleep” you’ll understand the frustration).
Even physical and emotional abuse doesn’t give you control over your kid. It just destroys the connection, the trust and safety, that the boundary is actually supposed to provide in the first place. Fuck, that a parent is supposed to provide.
The boundary itself isn’t enough to force compliance. And if your goal is to force compliance, then I don’t want your parenting advice anyway.
Fucking fascist.
It may come as a fucking shock but I don’t actually want my kids to be cowering and obedient in the face of authoritarian commands.
I actually do want them to be able to think for themselves. To know that their feelings matter.
Because when people say “kids need boundaries,” what they really mean is “kids need to be controlled.” And if the kids in question don’t submit to being controlled, then the implication is that their parents should shame and punish them. And multiple studies have shown that shame and punishment don’t produce lasting behavioral changes. What they do produce is trauma.
That’s literally the opposite of what kids need. And I mean all kids, but especially neurodivergent ones, who internalize so much shame over all the ways they already don’t fit in, who experience intense anxiety over meeting expectations, who are likely to be bullied and socially rejected by their peers, who have lagging skill across many developmental regimes, especially around communication and need their parents to be a refuge from all that pain, not a source of it.
“very few boundaries are worth the potential for disconnection that comes with the struggle to force an unwilling or uninterested kid to give a fuck about the things you give a fuck about.”
On top of all that, I have PDA kids (Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, or Pathological Demand Avoidance), who perceive instructive guidance and well intentioned advice as a demand, and therefore a threat to their physical safety. Who will fight being told what to do even when it’s something they really want to do, because having to surrender their sense of agency floods their nervous system with terror.
As a PDAer myself, I find being the keeper of boundaries to be a lot of fucking work.
Did you ever notice that making demands is, well, awfully demanding?
First, you have to recognize a problem and then define the underlying unmet expectation that’s making it a problem (which often takes a bit of digging). Then you have to communicate the expectation and why it is important, and what the consequence will be if the expectation goes unmet.
If your boundaries have a time limit, you are required to be a time-keeper. If your boundaries require a certain standard of performance, you are the inspector and enforcer of that standard.
And there’s always prep work before hand, building the scaffold to make the expectation within reach, the emotional labor of co-regulation, guiding the kids through difficult transitions, and cool down time afterward.
Then you have to follow up, mete out consequences, and deal with any remaining needs. And let’s face it. There’s always more needs.
It’s fucking exhausting.
Each of these steps is its own micro-demand, something that you have to monitor, to track, to hold mental space for, and to be prepared to fight for.
And frankly, I’m so tired of fighting.
Conflict avoidance aside, very few boundaries are worth the potential for disconnection that comes with the struggle to force an unwilling or uninterested kid to give a fuck about the things you give a fuck about.
As parenting advice goes, especially for parents of ND kids, “Kids need boundaries” is the equivalent of, well, me.
It’s tired.
It’s old.
It doesn’t work.
(ba dum tss)
Yeah, my kids do need boundaries, but not the way you mean it.
My kids need me to hold firm boundaries around what I myself as a human (not as their parent, but as an autonomous person) am comfortable with.
My kids need me to clearly give voice to the boundaries around my capacity to meet their needs, and my own.
My kids need me to take the time and do the hard work of understanding my limits. I will be the cartographer of my own interior geography, charting the landmarks of my wellness and the borderlands of overwhelm and burnout, so I can pull up short before crossing over into that unforgiving territory.
These boundaries are marked, hand painted signs and barbed wire, “cross this line and I will not be able to meet you where you need to be met.”
My kids need me to know the limits of my own capacity, and to build my boundaries around them because I am human. I get to be flawed and inconsistent and messy. I get to have preferences. I get to have feelings. And so do they.
I can use my boundaries to show my kids how to honor the space they unconditionally deserve to take up in the world. Especially when they have big messy feelings, when they’re struggling. Because that’s part of being human too.
In doing so, I’m learning to protect and care for the most vulnerable parts of myself, the parts that still don’t feel like they belong, the parts that have lost their voice asking for what they need, the parts that were shamed into silence.
I can only hope that by holding my own boundaries around my kids, that they are learning that their needs have a voice worth listening to.
“…my ND kids need boundaries, but not the boundaries I force onto them based on my own experience and expectations.
They need the boundaries that I have learned to transform from looming walls around the parts of my identity that my parents, my teachers, and my peers found unsavory, into gentle arms that I can use to hold myself.”
Herein lies the root of the problem with boundaries for ND parents like myself.
Many of us who discovered our neurodivergence in adulthood grew up around unhealthy boundaries. Boundaries as a source of trauma. Boundaries drawn tight around us that were mechanisms of control and invalidation. This isn’t a legacy I want to pass on to my own children.
We either come from a grind background – work harder, mask harder, try harder, and maybe you’ll win the battle against your own brain – and thereby earn the right to have your needs met, or a giver background, where people-pleasing is the path to survival, and people can only be pleased if you suppress your own needs in favor of theirs.(*) Or if you’re super lucky, like me, you do both! Hooray!
Grinders can’t boundary because they hold themselves to absurdly high standards, and mistake any trespass as a cue that they’ve just not pushed themselves hard enough.
Givers can’t boundary because they’ve become so divorced from their own needs that the idea of expressing them is utterly terrifying.
Both will collapse into burnout before admitting that they deserve to define the terms of their own existence.
So when we as parents, and as humans, need to advocate for ourselves with our children, we don’t really know how. And even if we were good at setting boundaries, we wouldn’t know where to put them.
We either push our kids to unrealistic standards with our grinding, or give in to their needs at the expense of our own because self-sacrifice is what we givers think love feels like.
So yeah, my ND kids need boundaries, but not the boundaries I force onto them based on my own experience and expectations.
They need the boundaries that I have learned to transform from looming walls around the parts of my identity that my parents, my teachers, and my peers found unsavory, into gentle arms that I can use to hold myself.
So please, if you don’t like pox, or aren’t prepared for a lecture on what sort of boundaries my neurodivergent kids and I actually need, next time you feel compelled to offer up a patronizing “kids need boundaries” in my presence, maybe just don’t.
(*) After writing this, I listened to a talk by Robyn Gobbel about modifying the language of polyvagal theory to make it accessible to neurodivergent kids so they can better understand their nervous systems, and realized that the grinder and giver types I described (based on my own experience) match up extremely well with her “watchdog” and “possum” pathways of autonomous nervous system response. Grinder/watchdog represents the fight/flight activation of sympathetic nervous system arousal and the Giver/possum leans more toward the fawn/flop shut-down response of the dorsal vagal state when the body is no longer trying to escape danger, but to conserve energy in response to an unavoidable situation. I love it when the science explains my observations!