A husband and wife came for coaching because they were having difficulty with their teenage son. He wasn’t pursuing the lifestyle that they wanted him to. He was coloring his hair, getting tattoos, smoking, and disregarding school.

The husband/father said that he was trying to set boundaries and limits with his son to teach him what’s right and wrong so that he is successful in life, but his son pushes away the more the father tries to teach. The father said that it hurts that his son is pushing away because he loves his son and wants what’s best for him.

What we discovered upon digging deeper is that the father was setting some very strict limits and imposing harsh consequences in his attempt to teach his son right and wrong. The father thought that the boundaries and limits he was setting (and the severe consequences the son was experiencing for violating them) were a demonstration of his love for his son. He thought that his son should recognize that and, despite how unreasonable his father’s rules and consequences were, that the son should appreciate that his father only wanted what was best for him and should, subsequently, obey him.

The disconnect was that the father was not working on fostering a good relationship with his son. He saw himself as being in charge of making sure his son obeyed him but did not understand that people (including our children) don’t care about what you have to say until they see how much you care.

Boundaries do not communicate love without relationship

It can be said that a boundary without compassion is cruelty. When there is no relationship, no trust, and no mutual respect, then boundaries set to control someone’s behavior are simply that - a form of control. And that’s how this son was perceiving his father’s actions. And control incites rebellion.

No one wants to feel controlled

Freedom is one of the most highly-valued and sought-after values of all. Galatians 5: 1 says “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” and it goes on to say “do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

Anyone who feels controlled/enslaved is going to rebel against it. And being told that you are being controlled because someone loves you enough to tell you what to do will not convince you that you are loved. Nor does it incline you to be obedient to that person.

It doesn’t matter what your connection is to the one in control: whether that person is your parent, your spouse, your boss, or even your government. People want freedom.

How to Foster a Good Relationship

How could this father have helped his son make better choices? By inclining the son’s heart to himself. And that is done through building a mutual relationship [learn the 5 ingredients of a healthy relationship].

A few ways this could have been accomplished:

Listening to what his son was experiencing
Validating his son’s experiences by seeing them from his son’s perspective
Respecting his son’s desire for freedom and choice by accepting his individuality
Explaining the reasons behind the limits the father sets for his son
Finding agreeable limits on behaviors that are not a safety issue
Letting his son explore who he wants to be without condemnation
Spending time doing things with his son that his son finds enjoyable
Affirming the good qualities he sees in his son
Showing love through all 5 Love Languages
Allowing mistakes or misguided choices and walking through those with his son

In the context of a healthy relationship, trust is developed, and the result of that is that the other person knows that you have their best interests in mind. Someone is more likely to believe what you say and follow your lead and your example if they know the “why” behind it and they trust you enough to know that it’s a good idea to listen to you. [Get my guide on helping children grow up to be emotionally healthy adults]

How To Destroy Trust

Part of developing a trusting relationship involves living a life of integrity. This means leading by example and ensuring that the expectations you have of others are the same expectations you have of yourself. If you have a double standard, it will be clear to others that you want to make the rules but you don’t want to have to follow them. And someone like that cannot be trusted. After all, why would someone believe in the value of a rule that isn’t being followed by the one who made it?

Another way to destroy trust is to make it clear that your true intent is to control someone. There are a number of tactics that people use to gain and maintain control over someone else’s thoughts, feelings, actions, and values - and teenagers are often keenly aware of the hidden motives behind someone’s words and actions. Why? Because they are at an age that they are gaining self-awareness and, even if they can’t verbalize it, are aware of when they feel controlled.

The contrast between control and freedom is especially stark during the teenage years because it’s a time when a person is beginning to learn how to live independently as an emotionally healthy adult. As someone striving to learn how to be an adult, being held down is a particularly suffocating feeling - and one that teenagers (and anyone, really) will fight to avoid.

What The Wife Can Do

We haven’t addressed the wife’s role in this situation. She came in quietly to support her husband while also wanting what was best for her son. Unlike her husband, she had developed a good relationship with her son but, in the process of trying to support her husband, as she thought she should, there was a rift forming in her relationship with her son and she was losing the positive influence she had over him.

She recognized that she would lose her relationship with her son altogether if things continued on as they had been, and this put her in a position where she felt like she had to make a choice between her husband and her son.

This is an example of the dynamics that sometimes play out, and in this case, it was the father who was perpetuating it. He was intentionally (but unadmittedly) putting his wife in a position to choose between him (with his harsh rules and punishments) and their son (who was just trying to grow up). The father was doing this because of insecurities that he had that he had never resolved or sought to heal - insecurities that made him need his wife’s support, regardless of how wrong his behavior was. And he would fall apart or fly into a rage if he didn’t get that support, putting even more pressure on the wife to support him.

Not understanding the dynamics of this, the wife sought to support her husband because that’s what she believed she was supposed to do. But she also didn’t want to lose the influence she had over her son or her relationship with him. The tug-of-war was between feeding her husband’s insecurities and supplying her son with the ingredients for emotional health that she’d been trying to give him.

Through ongoing coaching, she was able to find a healthy way to approach both her relationship with her husband and her relationship with her son. And although she’d previously put her hope for a happy family in the belief that “if only our situation would change, then everything would be better,” she discovered that . . . .

hope isn’t found in our situation changing; it is found in our situation . . .

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Parenting Teens (You’ll Incite Rebellion If You Do This)