Should we be firm with our kids, demanding they obey us, even if this causes conflict and unhappiness? Perhaps it’s our duty to remember who’s the parent and who’s the child and not be tempted to act as friends to our children. Is the tough love parenting method the most effective way to ensure our kids become responsible and good people?
Or should we love our kids unconditionally and connect closely with them? Does love and strong bonds result in secure and confident kids who want to do what is right without coercion? Can we be friends with our children as well as their parents?
Some years ago, after watching a viral video, posted by a friend on Facebook, I had a moment of doubt about how I was parenting my kids. I wondered: instead of connecting with my kids, showing them unconditional love and being friends with them, should I assume a position of authority, insisting they obey me? Should I practise tough love?
Tough love is the act of treating a person sternly or harshly with the intent to help them in the long run.
Bill Milliken described tough love through the expression, “I don’t care how this makes you feel toward me. You may hate my guts, but I love you, and I am doing this because I love you.” From Wikipedia
Can We Be Both Parent and Friend?
I’m scrolling through my Facebook feed when I see a link to a parenting video titled something like Be a Parent and Not a Friend to Your Kids. So being a curious person, I take a look. And after I’ve viewed the viral video, I am again struck by how differently I think about parenting compared to the friend who shared the link and many other people.
Just for a moment, I wonder: are they right? Is it not possible to be both parent and friend? Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong. Surely, I need to do my parental duty and demand obedience from my kids? It’s good for them. They need to respect me and do as I ask straight away, no questions allowed. Yes, they’ll be plenty of time to be friends with my kids when they’ve grown up. Right now, I need to be a parent.
Of course, I only turn these thoughts over in my mind for a very short time. But I’m guessing a lot of parents are watching this video and seriously considering the ideas presented by the vlogger. She’s saying something they want to hear:
Parents take back the reins. Forget all this being friends stuff. Show some tough love. It doesn’t matter if our kids protest and say such things as, “I don’t like you!” Hey, parenting isn’t a popularity contest. Take control. The battle is on, and we’re going to win.
There was a time years ago when I just wanted my kids to obey me. I’d had enough of encouraging, bribing, threatening, explaining, begging, or turning everything into a game to get them to do what I thought was right. I was tired. I just wanted to shout, “I’m the parent, and you’re the child. Just do what I say!”
Is there anything wrong with doing this? If we shout loud enough, perhaps our kids will actually do what we want. Maybe it’s good for them to be obedient. They’d be showing respect to us and learning self-discipline at the same time, wouldn’t they? Perhaps we’d be doing our kids a favour by training them.
Training them? Those words remind me of our puppy, Quinn. My daughter Gemma-Rose is training her. She demands obedience of the dog. She says, “Sit!” and Quinn lowers her back end, her velvet soft Shar-Pei skin puddling around her Great Dane bottom.
But do kids need the same kind of training as dogs? Instead of being obedient to our commands, surely it’s better for them to choose to do what is right? And how will they ever learn to do that if we’re always telling them what to do, no questions allowed?
Whenever we say such things as “Just do it!” or “I’m the parent!” or “I don’t want to hear another word!” we close down the lines of communication between our children and us. We erect a barrier. We break all connections.
Why are connections so important? When we are connected with our kids, we are the most important people in their lives. They feel loved and respected. They trust us. When they need guidance, they look to us for our opinion. They come to us when they need help. And it’s very likely that our connected kids will adopt our values and beliefs, the ones that we sometimes get so anxious about sharing with them.
Working on our connections might take a lot more effort than saying, “Do it, right this minute!” But surely it’s worth it? Don’t we all want to have strong bonds with our kids? It’s these bonds which allow us to be both parent and friend.
Real friends accept us as we are. They don’t criticise but instead encourage and support us. They like spending time with us and sharing our interests and involving us in theirs. They cheer us on. They make life fun. They listen when we need to talk and help us through the difficult times without taking over. We can open up and say anything to good friends. They respect us. They trust us.
Everyone needs a good friend. If we’re not willing to be friends with our kids, they’ll go looking for a friend elsewhere. Someone else will take the place that should be ours.
“Hey, Sophie, what do you think of this: ‘We can be friends with our kids later when they’ve grown up’?”
“Parents can’t suddenly turn around and tell their kids that they’re now ready to be their friends,” says my teenage daughter. “It doesn’t work like that. And even if it was okay, think of all those lost years.”
Yes, years we could have enjoyed being friends.
So can we be both parent and friend to our children? I know we can.
Stories about Connection from Radical Unschool Love
- A Teenager’s Thoughts
- Learning Right from Wrong
- Developing a Sense of Right and Wrong
- One-on-One Times
The mother in the viral YouTube video I mentioned in my story, Can We Be Both Parent and Friend?, talked while sipping a glass of wine. She was also digging into a family-sized bucket of ice cream. Earlier this year, I thought about the wine and ice cream. Were they significant? Were they part of the mother’s parenting story? After more pondering, I wrote another tough love post:
Sharing the Ice Cream and Rejecting Tough Love
What Others Are Saying About Tough Love
I hear all the time ‘the problem with kids these days is that their parents aren’t tough enough/don’t smack them/want to be their friend/don’t punish them enough’. Apparently if a kid isn’t behaving the way we want them to the answer is the be tougher on them. And if you don’t agree with that, well you brought it on yourself!
I completely disagree! I don’t think the answer to any difficulties you may have with your children is a bit more ‘tough love’. No, I can’t see how putting more distance in your relationship and disconnecting from your children is helpful. The answer, in my opinion, is the opposite. To connect more.
… I hope you’ll be inspired to check out at least some of the books on this list.
They might just change your life, they did mine 😉
To begin with, I had some trouble finding parenting books. At least, parenting books I love.
I found plenty.
But they weren’t what you’d call kind, relationship-building, or even love-inspired.
A little too much of the tough love, cruel to be kind vibe going on. I share more about this frustration in my journey to taking a kinder path…
Tough Love by Jan Hunt from The Natural Child Project website
Punishment, threats, and humiliation never achieve long-term goals because they provoke anger, create resentment, and diminish the bond between parent and child. Punishment interferes with the child’s opportunity to learn from direct experience, which ideally should be unencumbered by fear and pain. As the educator John Holt warned, “When we make a child afraid, we stop learning dead in its tracks.”
Children: Do We Get It? by Jan Hunt from The Natural Child Project website
While everything in life offers a learning experience, adversity can best be handled by those who have gained self-esteem, self-acceptance, and optimism through earlier experiences of encouragement and success. As the educator John Holt wrote, it is our store of happy experiences, operating like “money in the bank”, that best prepares us for difficult times.
Are Doubts as Bad as We Think?
In my story, Can We Be Both Parent and Friend? I shared a moment of doubt. Doubts are very inconvenient, aren’t they? They unsettle us. We begin to worry we’re on the wrong path. Should we change course? We don’t like doubts. But what if we looked at them in a different way? What if we recognised that doubts are opportunities to grow, learn and deepen our commitment to unschooling?
Here’s something I once wrote in a story, Step-by-Step Acceptance:
Podcast Version of This Post with Extra Content
Photos
Father-daughter friends
Things You Could Do Next
- Check out my books on Amazon
- Listen to podcast episode 165: Stories about Connection from Radical Unschool Love
- Read what other unschoolers are saying about tough love by following the above links
- Listen to the podcast version – episode 202 – of this post with its extra content
- Stop by and share your thoughts. Are you friends with your kids? Have you tried tough love? And do you ever have doubts about the way you’ve chosen to bring up your kids?
- If you like this post and podcast, you might like to share them on social media or with a friend!
As a homeschool family we have more time to spend together, get to know each other and develop mutual respect. We know each other very well through open communication and my children see how hard I work for the family, the home and their education and happiness. School children do not see this, they spend all day away from all that, they don’t always realise the work it takes to achieve things. They are tired and grumpy and come home to someone else telling them what to do. I have a good relationship with my children based on mutual respect. I don’t have a problem setting healthy boundaries for my children even within an unschool setting because I don’t think unschool means do whatever we like at the detriment of others. Instead my children have learned to be respectful of everyone and everything and they notice that schoolies they are hanging out with do not have this as much. They tend to go a bit more crazy when off the leash as it were. Instead when I feel my kids have overstepped a line and I am not happy then I will talk about this with them and we will come to an agreement together with understanding rather than an authoritarian or with anger. Recognising that they can understand why a boundary is set. Unschooling allows them to feel respected, loved and in control of their own lives which they appreciate and that generates respect and friendship. We are still parent and child, but can sow seeds of friendship that will be reaped when they are adults.
From Sid by the way I dont know why it went anonymous. Hello Sue!
Sid,
Oh yes, unschooling isn’t about always doing whatever we like. We have to be respectful and considerate of others. I agree that our connections allow us to have discussions and guide our kids. Perhaps we all need to learn how to use our freedom in the right way.
I pondered your last sentence: ‘We are still parent and child, but can sow seeds of friendship that will be reaped when they are adults.’ I was friends with my kids while they were growing up, but our friendship has definitely matured over time. For example, I now wait for my kids to ask for my opinion instead of trying to guide them. It’s an adult to adult friendship with continued love and acceptance. When my adult kids come home for a visit, I get very excited. I love spending time with them, catching up with news, sharing hopes and dreams, confiding our difficulties. Maybe a good adult child – parent friendship is based around trust built during childhood. We can tell a good friend anything knowing they’ll accept us, and won’t try to advise and take over if we’re having problems. We’ll also enjoy each other’s company!
I totally agree with you, Sue! I do not like it when people talk about training a child. It also reminds me of training a pet. I think you can definitely be both parent and friend to your children! When we tried to be strict with our oldest, our relationship really deteriorated. Now that we have a very loving respectful friend type relationship with our all of our kids, it is just wonderful! If parents would do that more with their teens, their experience in those years would be so much better.
And I think very highly of my kids, too! Some people think people in their teens and twenties do not have wisdom or much knowledge yet, but I totally disagree! I regularly ask my kids – adults and kids – what they think. I actually consider my oldest kids to be much smarter than me. They are doing such awesome things that I don’t think I could do! And it is a two way relationship. They ask me for advice, too, pretty often!
That picture of your daughter with the balloons reminds me of my living room. Our bookcases look exactly like that – filled to the brim with books and games.
– Gina
Gina,
I’m sorry I’m so slow replying to your comment. I always love hearing from you and chatting about my posts!
It sounds like you have fabulous young people in your family! You obviously enjoy their company.
Oh yes, we can learn so much from our kids if we’re willing to be friends and listen to them. I wonder if our kids are doing awesome things because, unlike us, no one held them back. I was often told my ideas weren’t practical: I had to be sensible. Or there was no time for them. Or they were just silly. I had to fulfil so many external expectations that I lost my motivation and confidence to be adventurous, use my talents or try new things.
I’ve been thinking a lot about bookshelves. Do our books reveal something about us? Perhaps I should have posted a photo of our encyclopaedia or religious bookshelf instead of the one that holds Andy’s crime novels. That would have been more impressive! Or should we recognise that we learn a lot from all books, classic, serious, light, and even twaddle? I might write a blog post about books!