 Parenting
Pathfinders: Tools for Raising Responsible Children - Section
11
Parenting Pathfinders Establish Healthy Boundaries with Children
Content:
LET GO Step 5: ORDER LIFE
First you have done the ALERT, ANGER and CHILD work about emotional hooks in your
family life with your older children. You then have gotten out your anger responses to
those hooks. You have self-nurtured by recognizing your rights to have healthy boundaries.
You have LIGHTENED THE PRESSURE to control your children. Then you EXERCISED YOUR RIGHT by
identifying what boundaries you wanted to set up for yourself with your older children.
Then you TOOK STEPS to establish the boundaries. Finally you GAVE UP THE NEED to control
your children and others by recognizing the control issues which keep you boundary-less.
Now you need to make a commitment to ORDER YOUR LIFE so that you will continually be on
the lookout for your boundaries being violated, ignored or dropped when involved with your
older children. You will need to designate as part of your boundaries, that recovery
programs, spiritual renewal and personal growth efforts are an essential part of your life
and all aspects of them must be respected and not altered. You will need to state that you
will not allow your family life to interfere with your efforts at personal growth and
recovery and that you will allow no one the power to divert you from this important
project in your life.
You will need to ORDER YOUR LIFE to recognize that you cannot have a healthy intimate
relationship with your adolescent and young adult children unless you have established and
maintained your boundaries in a healthy way. You will need to be on ALERT to recognize if
you are being hooked by your older children because money and material goods are the only
economy exchanged with them. You will need to do ANGER work if all you have in your
relationship with your older children is the money and things and lack all of the other
essential components to make it intimately healthy and enriching. You will need to do
CHILD work to nurture yourself to let you know that you are OK just the way you are to
give you the courage to face the fact that you need to alter and address your
materialistic based relationship with your older children which is not healthy or
emotionally rewarding. You will need to do more LET GO work to get back on track to
re-establish healthy boundaries if you relapse and allow yourself to be consumed in your
family life based on money and things but not on emotional or intellectual nourishing. You
will need to allow your support system to call you on it if you relapse into being
boundary-less, so you can alter your family life to a more emotional and spiritual plane.
You will need to work at preventing relapse by working hard at your recovery program so
that you have enough people in your life to "call you on it," if you begin to
isolate yourself and become a hostage to your older children. You will need to work at
being open to others about the need for their feedback if they see you sacrificing your
internal and external resources just so that you can remain involved in the lives of your
adolescent and young adult children. You will need to have support people prepared to call
you on it, if you drift away from your program of recovery, growth and spiritual renewal.
You will need to give permission to people to "call you on it," if they
recognize that you are deteriorating in your health, happiness and energy levels because
of your over enmeshment in your family life.
You will gain the health, happiness and increased energy, if you are able to deal with
your relationship with your older children in healthy way are able to maintain your
healthy boundaries in the process. You have much to gain by establishing healthy
boundaries with your children. It is up to you to be vigilant and on guard for any relapse
in maintaining healthy boundaries. Lastly you need to make a concerted effort to adopt the
words of Rheinhold Neibuhr as a daily affirmation for yourself to insure you do not
relapse into a boundary-less life in your family life:
Serenity Prayer
by: Rheinhold Neibuhr
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
taking, this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it.
Trusting that You will make all things right,
if I surrender to Your will.
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.
AMEN
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