I grew up as the oldest of five children, and I was often left to baby-sit my siblings when my parents went out. That led to getting several babysitting jobs from their friends, and then, when I was living on my own as a young man, some of my first jobs were doing residential care of troubled children. In one instance, I worked as a houseparent for six pre-adolescent boys. Sometimes they’d have me so jacked up, I wanted to scream, and at other times we were having so much fun I forgot it was my job. I remember getting on a sled with all those boys and swooshing down the side of a mountain in the Sierras, hitting a bump about half way down and all of us flying through the air with a sudden realisation that we had to land somewhere, only to land with such force that it knocked the wind out of us, and then sprawling together in the snow, not knowing if we were going to cry or laugh.

I looked into the eyes of this one kid who had been such a problem, and it was as if all the usual boundaries between adult and child, staff person and resident, were wiped away. We did not know how to BE with one another as we both lay in the snow, and that’s when we discovered we could just be ourselves. I think all that experience helped me to be a better person as a father for my own children. As natural as such things seem at times, being oneself as a parent can be very difficult. It requires the ability to ground oneself, and to know oneself as competent — capable of solving problems, of being a good person, of wanting appropriate things, and of being able to get them. When a parent knows him or herself, that tends to give structure and presence for the child to push against. Thus, conflict between parents and children can be a healthy part of life in such families, and certainly a needed part of the child’s development. Mom and dad are solid. I can’t move them whenever I want. I can’t make them second-guess themselves, but I can test myself by trying.

When things are working like that, the last thing children need is a mushy response from parents. Even though children will try to prevail, if they can, then the world becomes a very much more difficult, unpredictable, and scary place for them.

This picture is not the same as parents being rigid or inflexible. Rigid people, ironically, do not know themselves. It might seem like they do, because they are often very dogmatic about everything, and controlling of others to reinforce their opinions, but it’s largely an external structure of authority to which they are clinging. When I was on staff at a large church in central California, I was the minister of children and had to train a staff of Sunday school teachers. When I came to that position in the church the Sunday school teachers used to write the rules of their classrooms on their blackboards, and each teacher had a slightly different list of rules. When children moved from one class to another, they had to orient themselves to the blackboard and that external list of rules. I threw out all those blackboard rules and told the teachers to follow a more simple approach: The Two Rule System.

The Two-Rule System goes like this: Don’t talk when the teacher is talking, and do what the teacher says right away. If a child was breaking either of those rules, the teacher did not say, “Look at the blackboard and tell me what number six says.”

The teacher would say something like, “Look at me. What did I just ask you to do?”

This was a point of clarification to make sure everyone understood one another. Once it was determined that the child really knew what the teacher had been asking, then the teacher moved to the point of commitment. The teacher would say something like, “That’s right. So, if you don’t do as I asked, I’ll have to discipline.”

At the very next point of disobedience, the teacher must follow through with an appropriate discipline. This system orients children to the teachers, which is an interpersonal orientation, rather than to an external list of rules, and it allows teachers to be flexible and to shape expectations to individual children (rather than being bound to treat all children exactly the same), but for it to work, teachers must know themselves, have the confidence to set an expectation, then follow through with a consequence, and they must be able to look children in the eyes with a smile and affirm that the whole process is normal and everyone is accepted and acceptable — at one level just one person being with another. If people apply that to parenting, it tends to work the same in families as it did in classrooms.