Boundaries Blog — family

Tabitha telephoned her mother, who answered the phone weakly with hardly any voice at all. Concerned, thinking she was sick, Tabitha asked, "Mother, what's wrong?"

"I guess my voice doesn't work very well anymore," she replied. "No one calls me since you children left home."

No weapon in the arsenal of a controlling person is as strong as the guilt message....

Adolescents get angry a lot. They live in protest mode, so it is second nature for them to get mad at everything in the world, especially their parents. But some parents are conflict-phobic — they are uncomfortable and afraid of being the object of their teen's wrath, and so they avoid setting boundaries with teens.

However, this teaches adolescents that if they throw a tantrum, they can get out of a limit. Teens who learn this will also have difficulty experiencing healthy adult relationships. To help your child avoid this relational future, you'll want to teach him to accept responsibilities in relationships without having outbursts....

Susie had a problem that I (Dr. Townsend) had seen countless times before. This thirty-year-old woman would return from a visit to her parents' home and suffer a deep depression. When she described her problem to me, I asked her if she noticed that every time she went home to visit, she came back extremely depressed.

"Why that's ridiculous," she said. "I don't live there anymore. How could the trip affect me this way?"...

The parents of a twenty-five-year-old man came to see me (Dr. Townsend) with a common request: they wanted me to "fix" their son, Bill.

When I asked where Bill was, they answered, "Oh, he didn't want to come."

"Why?" I asked.

"Well, he doesn't think he has a problem," they replied.

"Maybe he's right," I said, to their surprise....

It was a normal day, but one that would forever change my friend's parenting. We had finished dinner, and I (Dr. Cloud) was visiting with my friend, Allison, and her husband, Bruce, when she left the dinner table to do some chores. Bruce and I continued to talk until a phone call took him away as well, so I went to see if I could lend Allison a hand.

I could hear her in their 14-year-old son Cameron's room. I walked in to a scene that jolted me. She was cheerfully putting away clothes and sports equipment and making the bed. She struck up a conversation as if things were normal: "I can't wait for you to see the pictures from our trip. It was so much — "

"What are you doing?" I asked....