Healthy Communication Boundaries with Your Growing up Children

There are times I want to be a fly on the wall in my kids’ lives. There used to be a time I wanted them to tell me everything.

School/work, friends, lunch, dreams, fears, beliefs, challenges, over-coming moments.

Encouraging dinner-table discussions, car-ride rhetoric of whys and hows – teaching my children as we come, go, sit and stand.

The communication-door-is-always-open approach.

My definition of everything has expanded. With that expansion has come the realization that I don’t want to know everything. My expectations of everything apparently have limitations.

There are some things a mom does not need to know. I never thought I would say that.

Until my son came home with a plate of scones one day – and declared them. . . . better than mine.

The grasshopper(yes, the grasshopper again) telling the teacher “I have out-done you.”

I stood there, on the other side of the counter, watching my son come in, from the outside coming in, with a plate of berry-something scones that he had baked with his then lovely-fiance-now-wife.

Maybe I need to establish our baking history. In 3rd grade, my boys learn to make box brownies. In 5th grade, my boys learn to make cakes from scratch. In 6th grade, this son made a better homemade lemon meringue pie than I could. I told him so. No ego problems there. Just a lot of mama pride.

This was different, though. Healthy communication boundaries respects, waits to be told by the teacher, “You have outdone the master (chef, teacher, do-er of laundry, healer of boo-boos, bed-time storyteller extrodinaire, stealth prayer-mama).

But grasshoppers are jumpy things, catapuling – which is why they tend to get run over in roadways. A grasshopper can jump 10x its length – so it can really get ahead of itself.

According to the article “The Grasshopper’s Hop, “the grasshopper’s jumping muscles may lead to an effective insecticide.”

That day, standing on the other side of the counter, as he presented me with a plate of scones, I realized that if I had not unconditional love in my heart, that this young grasshopper might have jumped into a life-threatening situation.

Some days I wished we’d taught, “Children should be seen and not heard” but that was not our parenting-heart.

Our heart was to teach them independence, reasons for their beliefs, thinkology, how to seek God so they could seek Him on their own, how to pass down our traditions and make new ones, how to communicate fluently, to grab thoughts from the recesses of their minds, study them and express them.

My heart still says, “Come on in, son, pull up a stool and tell me about your life.”

But as they get older, some things are better left between them and God. Some things are better left unsaid, like “My scones are better than yours.”

“I love you,” though, is always healthy boundary communication. “I love you,” is a Hail Mary Pass in a communication challenge.

Because I love my sons, they can say things they shouldn’t. Even saying their scones are better than mine. It’s just hard to swallow sometimes.

Note to those whose children are not teens yet: You might not be ready for this message. You might not be able to fathom ever having even a whiff of the thought to not want to hear “everything:” You might even be birthing the thought,“I’ll never think like that.” All I can say is“I was once there, too – before I had older teens to college student children.” Everything changes as they grapple with growing into adulthood, especially communication boundaries.

• Blue Cotton Mom’s Scrumptious Scones Recipe: Click Here