My Young Daughter Set a Boundary and I Respected It

My daughter and I have always been tight. Best friends, each other’s biggest supporters and fans. We’ve had a wonderful relationship. I’ve almost never let her down in the 17 years that we’ve been together. However, I’ll never forget the day she taught me a lesson in parenting.

Her mother and I divorced when she was almost two years old. We were married young and grew apart. Nobody cheated, drank too much, did drugs, joined, or started a cult. It was simply a case of being married too young and growing apart. After 10 years together, it was time to call it good and move on.

We’ve been able to successfully co-parent quite easily. With a healthy respect for each other and kindness toward each other’s new spouses, it’s been easy to get along. Putting our daughter’s well-being and mental health first has always been our priority. Having similar views about politics and religion also has helped matters.

It’s been easy raising Avery. She’s been a kind-hearted, empathetic child since her earliest grade school days. She’s sensitive and caring, and it matters a lot about what people that matter think of her. She never wants to let family or friends down. She’d do anything she could to help anyone in need.

As a member of the LGBTQ community since she came out as a lesbian at age 13, I’ve seen her take a leadership role in many situations. She volunteers at an after-school place for kids in junior high and high school and she’s always posting awesome things on social media regarding marginalized groups and promoting equality. I couldn’t be prouder of her than I am.

I was thinking the other day about how often I’ve driven back and forth from our home to her mother’s here in town. I also thought about how many times I’ve picked her up for our weekly and weekend visits. I’ve never missed a visit with her unless one of us was sick. I thought of how many years this has been going on and how many hours we’ve likely logged in the car together.

We’ve listened to so many songs together, made the funniest jokes, and discussed life in general. I’ll always hold on to those many, many memories. She’s one of my ride-or-die family members, for certain. Only now, she’s driving the car some of the time.

After thinking about these wonderful times, I started remembering a time or two that I’d let her down. Although those times have been very rare, I still feel guilty about them, and sad that I wasn’t a perfect parent in certain situations. She reassures me that she doesn’t remember any of the few times that I’ve mentioned. Except one.

I’ve written in a previous blog about my father being pretty mean to us some of the time. Granted, he was a younger man when I was born. He was raised by a strict, authoritarian father who believed in spanking with a belt. He likely didn’t know much better in many cases when dealing with us.

Check out this blog in which I referenced a particularly mean trick that he played on me back when I was in grade school. It’s Memory #7 on my list of ten grade school memories I thought of for a writing challenge I posted.

Yeah, that was pretty mean, thinking back about it now. And it brings me to the point of this blog. The one time that I really let my daughter down ever-so-briefly, and it made me realize that I was mimicking my father’s behavior. I didn’t like how that felt.

This happened around the age she was in the picture above. It was that time of year when report cards were coming out. I always looked forward to that. Our kids were usually straight-A students, with perhaps one occasional B during this time. It was always a nice opportunity to congratulate them and compliment them on being such great students.

Avery’s mother had sent me a picture of her report card and it was straight A’s along with wonderful comments about her personality and behavior. I was so proud of her as soon as I saw these grades and the feedback. Then it gave me an idea.

She was due to come over for her weekly overnight visit on Wednesdays. I picked her up, we had our usual enjoyable drive home, and once we arrived, I pulled up her report card on my phone. I looked at her very seriously and said, “Hey, we need to talk. Let’s go discuss something in private.”

She had a look on her face that read “Oh shit, now what?” We marched into her room and I closed the door. I sat down next to her and said something to the effect of, “We need to talk about this report card I just received today.” I used a fake-stern voice that was definitely almost never heard from me.

Her eyes started tearing up and I instantly felt horrible. This wasn’t ok. Damn it, I better let the cat out of the bag, quick. So I showed her my phone and the straight A’s and the wonderful comments from her teacher. She had almost started crying and let out a half-laugh, half cry of relief. Christ, what had I done?

I gave her the biggest hug and told her how proud I was of her and that I was just teasing about being so stern with her. She indeed had let a few tears stream down her cheeks and she looked me in the eyes. I’ll never forget what she told me.

“Uh, Daddy? Can you please not do that again? I know you were just joking and trying to fool me, but that really scared me. I didn’t want you to be upset with me or mad.” Ughhhhhhh. Dad-Fail, Level 99. I was crushed.

I felt myself tear up too, and she didn’t like seeing that, either. Again, the kid is an empath just like her old man. I then apologized to my eight-year-old daughter and told her how sorry I was. And I meant it.

She accepted my apology and told me that it was ok. A lesson was learned right there and then. My third-grader had taught her 38-year-old father a lesson that he needed to learn. We hugged it out and moved on with our afternoon.

As parents, we want to do right by our children. We should strive to be better parents than ours were. Even if we had a wonderful upbringing with almost no mistakes made by our own parents, that should encourage us to be better toward our own. I failed that day. And I owned that failure.

Some parents demand automatic respect from their children, regardless if they give that same respect to them as well. For me, it’s a two-way street. If I expect my children to love, respect, and treat me kindly, I damn sure better be setting the example of how to be that type of person, toward them.

I’m proud to say that 99.9% of the time, I’ve done that for them. They will vouch for that statistic if you ask them. We’re not perfect people. There are going to be times when we’re moody, irritable or we think it’s funny to play a little joke or prank on each other than doesn’t end up being very funny. We then learn lessons about how to respect each other’s boundaries.

It’s ok to have boundaries for ourselves. Just because I am the father in the equation doesn’t mean that I get to be rude, mean, cruel, or even accidentally not good to my children. They have rights too. They should not feel that their feelings matter less than mine, just because they’re younger than me.

I look back and understand why this happened. I was raised in a home where somewhat rude or mean-spirited jokes were played on us. As much as I hated some of the cruel things that were said or done to me occasionally by my father, here I was repeating that history that I wasn’t fond of. I learned from this.

I never again tried to purposely scare my children as a joke. It so wasn’t necessary to do and I knew that I never wanted to bring my daughter to tears, even under the guise of a joke. I admired Avery for setting down a boundary at such a young age. I wasn’t brave enough to do that with my father at her age.

I’m also proud of myself for taking her concerns the right way. It never would have occurred to me to be prideful about it and feel insulted that she asked me to respect her boundary. I do anything for my loved ones and wouldn’t give it a second thought. I’m glad she was comfortable enough in our father/daughter relationship to tell me how she really felt.

Think about this the next time you are dealing with your child and they ask you to please respect a boundary that is important to them. They have the right to decide what is and isn’t ok for them to have to endure. Your kids will love you and respect you for actually listening to them and taking their concerns seriously. &:^)