One of the most important books I have read in recent years is David Brooks’ The Social Animal (Random House, 2011).
Later, I saw Mr. Books speaking and responding to questions on the weekend “Books TV” feature on CSPAN2. And he said something important: “You don’t have to be a good parent; you just have to be a good enough parent.”
As a family therapist, I often spend time with parents–even marital partners–explaining what is “reasonable” regarding relationships and family life. Since many people I’ve seen, over the years, have grown up in such notably “un-reasonable” families–either families ostensibly “too perfect”–or, more glaringly, anything but.
With respect to parenting, here then is a portion of my book, Balanced Living: Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness (Wipf and Stock, 2009). This particular passage is from a section entitled “Balanced Parenting,” from the chapter, “Balanced Families.”
Effective parenting may be as hard as it is simple. To be a good (enough?) parent, you have to keep at least two things balanced. You have to be fair, and you have to be firm.
Another way of understanding firmness is that it means being consistent. My experience is that parents who aren’t fair usually aren’t very consistent either. They are often too rigid or too harsh, too demanding, and their expectations for their children may be to too high.
Except, if their kids raise enough of a fuss, if they escalate the kind of power-plays most children seem to be pretty good at doing, the same kind of parent will often cave in and back down and let the kid off the hook.
This style of parenting does not tend to promote stability of character in children.
A synopsis of research concerning children and their self-esteem seems to indicate the value of structure, not to mention how children deal with fear, how they develop some sense of success, how they learn to handle failure, or relate to others in appropriate ways. Children need firm guidelines. They need to know where the parameters of life tend to fall.
Just as they need nurturing and warmth, affection and acceptance, encouragement and challenge.
These two dimensions–fairness and firmness–they are not only compatible, in more functional families they tend to work together, and one promotes the other.
Fairness is reasonableness. It takes into account where a child is developmentally and what is reasonable, as a parent, to expect.
Firmness is letting a child know where the lines are drawn; it is teaching a child that if s/he crosses that line, you, as a parent, are not going to give in.
I have always thought it important to be even more than fair with kids. It is important to be generous. And when they push for even more, as most children do, it is necessary for parents to be strong, to not be intimidated by, or to be in a popularity contest with their kids.
Otherwise, how do children develop any sense of limits, boundaries, appropriateness, fairness, reasonableness, or generosity?
In more functional families, the boundary between parents and children is both clear (firm/ well defined) and flexible (fair/reasonable). Whereas in less functional families, there is usually considerable confusion between who is the parent and who is the child. In less functional families, the boundary between parents and children is typically too rigid or too loose, or an unfortunate combination of both.
