As I discussed in my last post, commitment is the cornerstone of parenting in foster and blended families. However, healthy commitments can never be unlimited. We should love our kids unconditionally, but healthy commitments are never unconditional. We must establish healthy boundaries in order to protect and grow our relationships with our children.
1. Connection Before Correction
One of the most important aspects of parenting other people’s children is establishing a strong connection with our children. Building trust should always take precedence over enforcing discipline. While structure is necessary, it should never replace the primary goal of forming a genuine bond with the child.
For foster parents, this can be particularly challenging since we must provide both structure and correction even before our kids are willing to build a connection with us. However, we should always remember that our ultimate goal is to build a relationship, not merely to impose rules. We are establishing boundaries because we care about our kids, not because we want them to fit with our program.
2. Protecting Our Relationships
Parenting, particularly parenting children who have suffered trauma, often feels like a one-way street where we give endlessly to our children. Without strong boundaries, we will exhaust ourselves, which in turn sabotages our relationships. We are are not superheroes with limitless reserves of patience and energy. Just as we cannot run a marathon with two broken legs, we can’t parent well from a place of exhaustion.
Boundaries ensure that we can preserve our resources—emotional, physical, and mental—so we can continue to meet the needs of our kids. Boundaries are like fences on a farm. The fences aren’t a punishment, but a protection—both to keep the animals from wandering off and to shield them from predators. In the same way, boundaries in parenting help maintain a structured and secure environment where both we and our children can flourish.
3. Enforcing Self-Respect
Self-respect is fundamental in any relationship. While we need to show unconditional love to our children, we shouldn’t tolerate disrespect or mistreatment. Setting clear expectations on how our children should treat us helps us maintain our self-respect while also modeling self-respect for our children.
4. Teaching Children to Set Their Own Boundaries
Our kids may or may listen to what we say, but they will learn best from what they see us do. Just as young children mimic their parents mowing the lawn or cooking, they will also learn how to navigate relationships by watching how we set and maintain boundaries. When they see us setting and enforcing healthy boundaries, they internalize the importance of doing the same thing in their own lives. This skill is essential to helping them develop healthy relationships and personal self-respect.
5. Balancing Needs and Resources
Setting boundaries requires us to balance our children’s needs with our available resources. Parenting is demanding, and we need to keep our focus on our primary responsibility of meeting our kids’ needs. What they need is rarely what they want, and what they need is rarely an easy lift for us.
It is tempting to use boundaries and house rules to make things run more smoothly and make our lives less challenging. The point of boundaries, however, is not to serve our needs. They are a tool for us to serve our kids’s needs. That focus means, for example, that if our kids have a meltdown, we don’t discuss boundaries right then. We wait until later or maybe give them a complete pass this time.
The point of setting boundaries is to provide our children structure to learn essential life skills. That structure needs to be strong, but flexible enough to accommodate the various stages of our journey with our children.
6. Clear Communication
Children do not instinctively understand what we expect of them, particularly if they come from backgrounds where adults didn’t have healthy boundaries. We need to communicate our expectations clearly and consistently.
For example, if a child uses a disrespectful nickname for us, we need to learn how calm explain something along the lines of, “I don’t expect you to call me ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad,’ but I do expect you to be respectful. Let’s find a name that works for both of us.”
Assuming that children “should know better” is an unfair expectation. Just as we can’t assume our children know how to load a dishwasher without explanations, we can’t assume that they know how to show respect or communicate their needs appropriately. Boundaries aren’t an important way for them to learn those life skills.
7. Give Ourselves Grace
Finally, we should keep in mind that we don’t have to be perfect. We are human. We will get exhausted; we will make mistakes. Fortunately, even less-than-perfect Plan B parents can forge a strong relationship with kids. We need to give ourselves grace when we make mistakes and show our children how to apologize and recover. If nothing else, we can remind ourselves that learning how to live with imperfect people is an important life skill for our kids, so we can all learn something from our mistakes.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, healthy boundaries are all about protecting our commitments and our relationships. They are about connection, respect, and ensuring that we have the resources we need to take care of our children. When we honor our own needs and boundaries, we show our children how to do the same thing in their own lives. Strong boundaries are essential protect our commitments and the relationships we want to build.
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Interested in learning more?
• Download my free e-book to learn how to stop being the villain in your child’s story.
• Learn more principles of foster parenting and step-parenting from my online courses at YSO Academy.
• Buy my book, Raising Other People’s Children, for more thoughts about how to be the person who’s not supposed to be there.
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