Henry Cloud's Blog

Since writing Boundaries in 1992, we (Dr. Cloud and Dr. Townsend) have spoken to more than a million people about creating boundaries in their lives. Thousands have told us that creating boundaries has enabled them to love and to live better, some for the first time. Nothing is more exciting than to see people grow and change.

But from our own experience and that of our audiences and readers, one thing became obvious to us. Adults with boundary problems had not developed those problems as grown-ups. They had learned patterns early in life and then continued those out-of-control patterns in their adult lives, where the stakes were higher. They had learned the following boundary problems as youngsters:

Inability to say no to hurtful people or set limits on hurtful behavior from others
Inability to say no to their own destructive impulses
Inability to hear no from others and respect their limits
Inability to delay gratification and accomplish goals and tasks
Tendency to be attracted to irresponsible or hurtful people and then try to “fix” them
Taking responsibility for other people’s lives
Ability to be easily manipulated or controlled
Struggles with intimacy and maintaining closeness with others
Inability to be honest with those they are close to
Inability to confront others and resolve conflicts productively
Experiencing life as a victim instead of living it purposefully with a feeling of self-control
Addictions and compulsions
Disorganization and lack of follow-through

So we began to think preventively. We love helping adults with boundary problems that have gone on for years, but we also want to help children avoid experiencing what many of us had to go through to repair boundary deficits. This realization led us to write Boundaries with Kids.

Most of the adults we encountered had well-intentioned parents. But many times these parents had had no clue about how to build boundaries into their children; thus they passed on their own limited boundary functioning. Had many of these parents known how to raise a child with good boundaries, much pain could have been prevented. We want to help you develop the kind of character in your children that will prevent many problems with which adults struggle.

In addition, parents knew the pain they had been through and did not want their children to go through the same kind of learning curve. It is better for a child to lose privileges than for an adult to lose a marriage or a career. Furthermore, they realized that boundaries are a key to making any relationship work, and they wanted to know how to live out the principles of boundaries with their children. Their questions can be grouped into three basic areas:

How do I teach boundaries to children?
How do I enforce my own boundaries with my children in appropriate ways?
How can I ensure my children won’t have the problems with boundaries that I had?

As you explore Boundaries with Kids, we will help you answer these questions and help your children develop the character that will lead them into the life that God created them to have.

________

Click here to read a sample chapter and learn more about Boundaries with Kids.

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post Adults Without Boundaries Raise Kids Without Boundaries appeared first on Boundaries Books.

By Dr. John Townsend

There are several dimensions to how successful leaders think that are important to know, but I want to focus on five especially. If you want to develop your thinking, the following practices will serve you well.

1. Know Your Cognitive Style

Your cognitive style refers to the way you process information from your environment. It has to do with how you read journal articles, how you listen to what others tell you, and how you draw conclusions based on how you observe the workplace. One key aspect of cognitive style is whether your thinking tends to be linear or nonlinear.

Linear thinkers are more logical and ordered in how they think, while nonlinears come at problems and opportunities from different angles. Linear thinkers typically have a step-by-step approach to their work. Nonlinears try to see if there is a new way to look at an issue. This description is a broad one. People who research these matters disagree on what specific terms and descriptions to use, but for the purposes of this post, these distinctions describe the difference.

So in terms of your own cognitive style, you most likely know which basic way your mind tends to work. The best way to be intentional about keeping your mind in shape in this regard is to continue honing your dominant cognitive style while appreciating and cultivating the other style as well.

This is important for your leadership because you need to harness and develop both cognitive styles as you lead the people around you. People need to follow someone who can help them with logical progression and also with creativity as their own situations and styles mesh with yours.

2. Think Relationally

Being a clear and productive thinker requires the ability to craft thoughts and ideas in terms of relationships. Your mind didn’t develop in a vacuum, apart from people. And it is a mistake to keep your thinking divorced from people—what they mean to you and how your thoughts will affect them. No matter what your area of leadership is, people are part of it. You lead people, you influence people, and you matter to people. Your organization has something to do with some service to people, whether a computer, a bank loan, a home, education, medical care, groceries, personal growth, or a retail outlet. This means it’s necessary to keep people in mind when you create opportunities and solve problems.

Consider the impact of your thoughts on those around you. You will have an impact, one way or another. So keep your thoughts connected to relationships, and keep people’s faces in front of you. There is no better way to have your thoughts integrated with the rest of your inner world than to be a relational thinker.

3. Orient Yourself to Reality—with a Nod to the Positive

Another aspect of successful thinking is your orientation to reality. To be an effective leader, you need to think about what is going on, not what you would like to be going on. Reality happens, and it always wins. You must take the bad news with the good news, even if it reflects poorly on you. This is the only way you will ever make transformational changes in yourself and in the people you work with.

4. Be Willing to Hold Opposing Thoughts

Another mark of leaders who think well and successfully is that they are able to live in conceptual tension. They can listen to, and think about, ideas that are diametrically opposed. They have enough space in their minds to consider and analyze both sides while they are moving toward a decision.

This is not an easy task. We all have a tendency, as leaders, to think, Plan A is better than plan B for these reasons, so let’s go for A. Because of the pressure and speed of leadership today, we simplify things to that level and move on. It becomes a zero-sum game: A wins and B loses. While that is often the right way to go, it is not always. Thinking leaders must resist the impulse to immediately discard an idea that is antithetical to one they like. If they can live with the tension for a while, they are apt to come up with even better solutions.

5. Adapt to New Realities and Truths

Related to holding opposing thoughts in tension is the ability to change and adapt when the facts dictate it. The best leaders know that reality is larger than they are, so they don’t mind taking a different course when there is new information. Clear thinking means submitting your mind to any new reality.

Leaders who think will need the ability to admit when they are wrong or should change direction. Those who insist that the original plan is the only plan are often at risk. You instill doubt in people with that stance, and you instill trust in people when you adapt to new realities.

This doesn’t mean you have to be open to absurdities. Some things just don’t make sense. But it does mean that you have to at least consider two perspectives or opinions that don’t agree. Don’t immediately react and toss one out. Give your mind a little time to see if there is a win-win.

A Final Bit of Wisdom

Let’s conclude this post with a tip I provide for many leaders I work with: Make a habit of challenging your own logic. That is, whenever you work through some problem and come to a decision point, vet and scrutinize your thinking process to see if it can stand up to scrutiny. Don’t assume because you have done the due diligence of mapping out an answer to a problem that your thinker is infallible.

Let’s say that you have just come up with a strategy to address the growth of a competitive organization. You looked at what they did, how they did what they did, brainstormed tactics that might help you compete better, thought through them, then picked one.

Great. Now do it again, and then bring it to a couple of truth-based associates and have them ask you the hard questions about how you arrived at your decision. If your thinking process was clear and effective, it will come out as a win. If not, you have just saved yourself from an expensive mistake, or what author Dave Ramsey calls the “stupid tax.”

Too many leaders are too tired or bored or entitled to question their logic, and the outcomes are not good. Challenging your decision-making logic is a healthy sowing that will enable you to reap success in your organization. As the Bible teaches, “You will always harvest what you plant” (Galatians 6:7 NLT). This principle will never fail you.

________

Taken from Leading from Your Gut: How You Can Succeed by Harnessing the Power of Your Values, Feelings, and Intuition by Dr. John Townsend. Click here to learn more about this title.

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post Five Practices of Successful Thinkers appeared first on Boundaries Books.

When some individuals begin to develop boundaries, they say, “But my mother (or father, or sister, or brother) is my best friend.” They often feel fortunate that, in times of family stress, their best friends are the family in which they were raised. They don’t think they need an intimate circle of friends besides their own parents and siblings.

They misunderstand the biblical function of the family. God intended the family to be an incubator in which we grow the maturity, tools, and abilities we need. Once the incubator has done its job, it’s supposed to encourage the young adult to leave the nest, connect to the outside world (see Genesis 2:24), and establish a spiritual and emotional family system on one’s own. The adult is free to do whatever God has designed for him or her.

Over time, we are to accomplish God’s purposes of spreading his love to the world, to make disciples of all the nations (see Matthew 28:19–20). Staying emotionally locked in to the family of origin frustrates this purpose. It’s hard to see how we’ll change the world when we live on the same street.

No one can become a truly biblical adult without setting some limits, leaving home, and cleaving somewhere else. Otherwise, we never know if we have forged our own values, beliefs, and convictions—our very identity—or if we are mimicking the ideas of our family.

Can family be friends? Absolutely. But if you have never questioned, set boundaries, or experienced conflict with your family members, you may not have an adult-to-adult connection with your family. If you have no other “best friends” than your family, you need to take a close look at those relationships. You may be afraid of separating, individuating, and becoming an autonomous adult.

________

Learn more about how to say no and really mean it by reading The New York Times bestselling book, Boundaries, now updated and expanded!

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post Is Your Family Holding You Back? appeared first on Boundaries Books.

I (Dr. Cloud) was talking to a young man one day about his girlfriend. He was thinking about getting married, and he had questions about their relationship. Several times during the conversation, he said that something she did or something about the relationship did not “make him happy.” It was clear that this was a theme for him. She was not “making him happy.”

When I asked, he said that she wanted him to deal with some things in the relationship. He needed to do some work that took effort. It was not a “happy” time. When he had to work on the relationship, he no longer liked it.

At first, I was trying to understand what the difficulties were, but the more I listened, the more I saw that he was the difficulty. His attitude was, “If I’m not happy, something bad must be happening.” And his immediate conclusion was always that the “bad” was in someone else, not him. From his perspective, he was not part of any problem, much less part of the solution. Finally, I had heard about as much as I could take of his self-centered ramblings.

“I think I know what you should do,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“I think you should get a goldfish,” I replied.

Looking at me as if I were a little crazy, he asked, “What are you talking about? Why do you say that?”

“It sounds to me like that is about the highest level of relationship you are ready for. Forget the marriage thing.”

“What do you mean by ‘the highest level of relationship’?”

“Well, even a dog makes demands on you. A dog has to be let out to go to the bathroom. You have to clean up after it. Other times, it requires time from you when you don’t want to give it. A dog might interfere with your happiness. Better get a goldfish. A goldfish doesn’t ask for much. But a woman is completely out of the question.”

Now we had something to talk about. This person’s greatest value was his own happiness and his own immediate comfort. And I can’t think of a worse value in life, especially a life that includes marriage. Why? Is this a killjoy attitude? Hardly. I am not advocating misery. I hate pain. But I do know this: People who always want to be happy and pursue it above all else are some of the most miserable people in the world.

The reason is that happiness is a result. It is sometimes the result of having good things happen. But usually it is the result of our being in a good place inside ourselves and our having done the character work we need to do so that we are content and joyful in whatever circumstance we find ourselves. Happiness is a fruit of a lot of hard work in relationships, career, spiritual growth, or a host of other arenas of life. But nowhere is this as true as in marriage.

Marriage is a lot of work, period. I don’t know anyone who has been married very long who does not attest to that. When couples do the right kind of work—character work—they find that they can gain more happiness in their marriage than they thought possible. But it always comes as a result of going through some difficult moments. Conflicts, fears, and old traumas. Big and small rejections, arguments, and hurt feelings. The disillusionment of someone being different than was imagined. The difficult task of accepting imperfections and immaturity that are larger than one thinks they should be.

All of these things are normal, and all of these things are workable. And if people work through them, they reach happiness again, usually a happiness of a deeper and better sort. But if they hit these inevitable walls and have the attitude that this problem is “interfering with my happiness,” they are in real trouble. They will be angry with the “inconvenience” of their happiness being interrupted and will refuse to solve the issues or will just leave the relationship. If happiness is our guide and it goes away momentarily, we will assume that something is wrong.

The truth is (and this is why happiness is such a horrible goal) that when we are not happy, something good may be happening. You may have been brought to that moment of crisis because of a need for growth, and that crisis may be the solution to much of what is wrong with your life. If you could grasp whatever it is that this situation is asking you to learn, it could change your entire life.

This is why the Bible tells us to “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all with out finding fault, and it will be given to him” (see James 1:2–5).

________

Discover more ways to make marriage better than you imagined it could be with Boundaries in Marriage. Learn More

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post How Happiness Can Hurt Your Marriage appeared first on Boundaries Books.

When children come into the world, they are confused about the nature of their relationships. They do not think they are dealing with one person. In their minds, there are two mommies, not one. Or, two daddies, not one. There is the “good” mommy and the “bad” one.

The good one is the one who gratifies them. When they are hungry or needy, they protest, and the good mommy comes and relieves their stress. When they are gratified, they see this mommy as “good.” But if something they want is not forthcoming and Mommy frustrates their wish, she is seen as the “bad” mommy. You may even remember this literally happening. It is not unusual for a child to hear “no” and say, “Bad Mommy.” This split is universal.

Some adults have still not resolved this problem. If you do what they want, they are very loving and see you as a good person. But if you say “no” to them, they see you as bad for not giving them what they wanted. Then when you gratify them, you are seen as good all over again.

The other side of this is what goes on inside children. When they are getting what they want, they see themselves as entitled to what they are receiving; when they are being frustrated, they see themselves as victims of the “bad mom.” So not only do they see two mommies, but they also experience two selves as well: the entitled self and the deprived self. You can probably remember seeing this in very young children. When happy, they are very happy. When angry or sad, they are very angry or sad.

But as children experience both having their needs met and being frustrated with limits, they slowly merge the two images of themselves and others. They slowly realize a few extremely important things:

My needs are consistently responded to.
Not all my needs and wants are gratified.
The same person is both giving to me at some times and depriving me at other times—the one I love is the one I hate.
I am fortunate at times, and at other times I have to deal with being frustrated.

As this combination of gratification and frustration occurs a few million times, children gain a secure sense of the world’s being “not perfect” in gratifying them all the time, but “good enough” in giving them what they need. They slowly give up their wish for the “all-good other” who is going to meet all their needs perfectly and learn to love the one who both loves them and frustrates them. And they decide people are not perfect, but good enough. Children endure enough frustration to become grateful for what they receive as they find out they are not entitled to everything they want

To accomplish this task, children need two important things from you: gratification and frustration. Children who are never gratified are in a constant state of need, and they will never feel grateful because they literally have not gotten enough. This is the danger of parenting systems that overemphasize depriving the child early in life for fear that the child will control the home. Children must have their needs met to develop trust and gratitude. As the Bible says about us and our Father in heaven, “We love because he first loved us” (see 1 John 4:19). We need to be given to first.

But children who are never frustrated never understand that they are not the center of the universe, that they are not owed whatever they want, and that others do not exist only for their needs. The balance of gratification and frustration tempers the extremes of neediness and entitlement.

The child who experiences frustration gives up the view that he’s entitled to everything he wants and that others should perform for him. In addition, he doesn’t see himself as a victim when he’s deprived, nor does he see others as bad when they do not do what he wants. He develops a balanced view of himself and others.

_______

Learn how to instill the kind of character in your children that will lead to a balanced, productive, and fulfilling life in Boundaries with Kids.

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post Help Your Children Develop a Balanced View of Themselves and Others appeared first on Boundaries Books.

You have never received a winner’s trophy before playing in the championship game. You have never been offered a promotion before you excelled in your job. Your parents never instructed you to make sure you ate your dessert first and not worry about the vegetables, since they would take care of themselves.

Why did none of these things happen? Because that’s not how successful lives work. It makes no sense to earn trophies before you win games, get a promotion before you perform well, or eat sweets before you consume your dinner. An attitude of entitlement, though, tells us that it can and should be this way: “You can have it all. Do what is easy and comfortable first, and you’ll be rewarded with a lot of amazing things.”

It’s a lie.

The entitlement disease’s insistence that you leave the hard stuff till later (or never) results in disaster. Let’s find out why.

Let’s say you asked me to coach you in how to find your dream career. You are forty-two years old and a pleasant person, and while your current position has paid the bills, it’s not exciting, it is not you, you have no passion for it. You want something that engages your strengths and skills, means something to you, and still provides for you and your family. This is a common scenario and an important one.

We’ll begin our search for this new career track through a process of discovering your strengths, looking at the opportunities out there, and evaluating what has worked for you and what has not. With every single client I coach through this lengthy and challenging process, we will get to one particular place. That place might be that your time is taken up with work or family issues. Or that you aren’t as passionate about this career-search process as when you started — the honeymoon is over. Or that you have other responsibilities — such as a friend who needs a lot of your time to help him through a divorce — that are taking your energy. That place is an important stage in your growth process. It can stall you, divert you, or derail you.

When we come to that place, I know that you’re about to find what I call your Next Hard Thing (NHT). Your NHT is the choice you need to make that will get you past the difficulty. I call it hard because it almost always is. It might be simple, it might be clear, but it won’t be easy. Most of the time, you’ll say, “I’ve been here before.” And yes, you have. But this time you need to do something about it — something challenging that will help you finally resolve it.

Identifying your NHT is a large part of the win. Once you know you need to say no to someone, or eliminate something good to make room for something great, or confront another person, you’re almost there. But to move beyond that, there are attitudes that you must deal with to keep you moving. The entitlement mantra concerning your NHT says: The next hard thing is too difficult, so I’ll just do something else now.

Most people succeed not by waiting, but by making a difficult choice. The better path is the Hard Way mantra, which says: Today I will choose to do something that helps resolve my obstacle, and I’ll feel better.

The NHT can take many different forms. Your NHT is about some specific behavior, and it may be behavior you have been avoiding: a phone call, setting a boundary with a friend, a conversation, canceling a subscription to a magazine you don’t need, turning off Facebook after thirty minutes. Behavior is measurable. It is not fuzzy. It is just behavior.

And behavior always begins with a step. Even a little step. It might be something that takes you just ten minutes today. That’s okay. A step begins the process and puts you in a better place.

Just plunge in.

______

Taken from The Entitlement Cure by Dr. John Townsend.

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

Watch as Dr. John Townsend talks about the importance of preparing for the future.

The post How to Overcome the Trap of Entitlement appeared first on Boundaries Books.

By Jeffrey Olrick, Ph.D.

As you navigate through life together, you’ll have ample opportunities to offer your child natural consequences when they cross a boundary or make a poor choice. For instance, you and your kid may agree that he can do his chores on the weekend, as long as they’re all done by bedtime on Sunday. If Sunday night comes and his chores aren’t done, the next weekend he’ll need to complete them before doing anything else on Friday night.

If you’ve mapped this out ahead of time, this won’t be a surprise because the two of you will have already agreed on consequences if he didn’t follow through.

But there are other times when more serious breaches of trust and respect occur, breaches that require a more careful consideration of the boundaries you have with your child. In these cases, you’ll need to reassess the privileges and trust you have given your child.

Perhaps your child has broken boundaries having to do with her online activity, knowingly engaging with harmful material or purchasing things without permission. Perhaps your teenager has lied about his whereabouts on a weekend sleepover. Perhaps your child has written hurtful comments online about another peer or passed along inappropriate content.

In such cases, serious conversations need to occur. Your goal should be to gather information, see things from your child’s view, share how others may be experiencing the situation, including yourself, and seek reconciliation. This is how you can map a way forward with a clear affirmation of personal boundaries and expectations.

In more serious boundary breaches, it is valuable to our children to feel the weight of their actions and to work to regain trust and standing. There can be consequences that last beyond an uncomfortable conversation. But if you want to foster a positive learning experience, make the consequences as restorative and natural as possible.

Your child may have to lose privileges until concrete signs of trust and responsibility have been reestablished. To make consequences tangible, you might insist that she work to repay someone, write out an apology, do community service, or research an issue, depending on the situation.

In these cases, when things feel hard and even impossible, try not to despair. Remember growth trust (i.e., intuitively trusting that your child will eventually grow, mature, and integrate herself with the world around her as long as she has basic opportunities for stimulation, learning, nurture, and structure — discussed in my book The 6 Needs of Every Child) and that your child’s brain will do the work it needs to do to develop and organize itself to succeed in the world with others, especially if you walk with her to find a way forward when she seems lost in her mistakes.

A growth trust mind-set will help you embrace each of these strategies for thinking about and enforcing boundaries with your child because growth trust presumes that your child is invested in more than just getting his own way. It presumes that your child wants things to go well for him with others, not just for him alone. And this point of view is completely justified in light of the essential need all humans have to stay connected to others.

Our genes tell us that rejection, especially by our caregivers, is an invitation to death. Our survival has always depended primarily on staying in the good graces of our clan. We may push the limits of rejection, but we don’t want to go so far that we get kicked out. The urge to have our way is strong in all of us, but somewhere inside most every child is the desire for a win-win and for both of you to be happy with your experiences together.

If you find yourself powering up—relishing in a position of exerting power over your child or acting out a pattern from your childhood that taught you boundaries but left you feeling small—then I encourage you to rethink. Remember the call of relationship and that we give our children boundaries not to close them in and keep them under our control but to help them develop self-control and to direct them toward paths of healthy discovery and abundant life alongside others.

There is a promise that runs through the Judeo-Christian faith story. It’s a promise that one day there will come a time when love toward neighbor will not be a rule that people follow out of guilt or fear but because it is written on their hearts.

Some people believe that this promise will come to pass only in some future age, when God changes us in some sudden spiritual transformation. But perhaps such an age is available to us now, in the life and wisdom of the Spirit. If we let it, that Spirit will work through us to write the laws of love of self and others on our children’s hearts as we do the hard and patient work of giving them the gift of healthy boundaries.

________

Adapted from The 6 Needs of Every Child: Empowering Parents and Kids through the Science of Connection by Amy Elizabeth Olrick and Jeffrey Olrick, Ph.D. Click here to learn more about this book.

Jeffrey Olrick, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with children and families. Dr. Olrick has over twenty years of experience working in a variety of settings, including the University of Virginia, residential treatment, the public school system, community mental health, and private practice. He lives in New Zealand with his wife and their three children.

Boundaries with Kids also addresses how to use healthy boundaries to help your children make healthy choices.

  Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post How to Set Healthy Consequences for Your Child’s Boundary Breaches appeared first on Boundaries Books.

By Dr. John Townsend

When my sons were small, they often argued and fought. Their disagreements erupted for any number of reasons, and sometimes, the best strategy seemed to be to separate them for a period of time.  When it appeared that they had learned a lesson and could once again play well, I let them get together again.

For the situations in which there was a bad guy and I separated them, it would seem to make sense that the hurt brother would have had enough of his offending brother. You would expect that the mean one would want to reconnect and reconcile sooner than the hurt one. But that was not the pattern; there was no pattern. Both boys always wanted to get back together and play after approximately the same amount of time had passed.

No matter who was the perpetrator and who the victim, the cooling-off period for each was similar. My best understanding of this is simply that their attachment trumped their desire to be away from each other. After a timeout, the desire to be together was stronger than their anger and fear.

This dynamic doesn’t apply just to my sons or even just to kids. It applies to all of us. Understanding the return of desire — the drive to reconnect — is key to learning what happens when you set boundaries.

When you set a boundary in a relationship, you create space, room, between you and another person. In healthy connections, the space simply defines you and the other person as two distinct individuals with different minds and opinions, but who still benefit from being connected to each other.

However, when you have to set protective boundaries with someone, the space you create between you is about guarding yourself from something not good for you: control or manipulation, for example. And the nature of the space can range from something minor, such as choosing to not talk about certain topics, to something major, such as moving out of your home or even permanently leaving the relationship.

Creating space has an obvious consequence for the other person, but it also has an impact on you. It can actually increase your desire and interest in a relationship, either the one you are working on, or a new one altogether. This is ironic, because when you have had a rough go of it with someone, you might think that the last thing you need is any kind of desire for another relationship: Give me space! And, while that is a common feeling at the beginning of the boundary period, it does not last forever. The space is a vacuum, and the vacuum puts your in touch with your God-given desire to connect.

Here is the point: wanting someone doesn’t mean you are crazy for having the desire, nor that the time is necessarily right to connect or reconnect with a person. It is simply a sign that you are alive inside and that the boundary has given you breathing room to feel your human need for connection. Pay attention to it, be glad you are alive, and use good judgment and good people to help you decide what to do with it.

________

Discover when and how to trust again after you’ve set appropriate boundaries, how to connect deeply without being hurt, and how to safely grow your most intimate relationships in Beyond Boundaries by Dr. John Townsend.

Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post The Desire to Reconnect Doesn’t Mean You’re Crazy appeared first on Boundaries Books.

With college campuses closed and many jobs being lost due to the COVID-19 crisis, many adult children are moving back home with their parents. Now what?

Dr. John Townsend helps parents to navigate expectations and responsibilities with their adult children, to set healthy boundaries, and show mutual respect. He addresses communication issues, and discusses formulating and implementing a plan for rules in your home that can work for everyone.

Below is a partial transcript of part of the discussion between Jim Daly, of Focus on the Family, and Dr John Townsend, co-author of Boundaries.

Dr. Townsend:

Because of what’s happening [with the COVID-19 crisis], they (adult children) are loosing jobs and they can’t be in school and they’re coming back [home] as adults.

Basically what we have happening is a temporary reversal of God’s entire created order. Because when you look at Genesis 2, it says, what do you do when you get old enough to get out there and be autonomous, you leave and cleave. You find your own mate and social system, and career, and passion. All of a sudden the breaks are on that stuff, and somebody who had these dreams to get out there and find their way … [now] I’ve got to come back to my bunker room with my bunk bed and my little brother on the bottom of it?

The reversal of the created order creates a tension in and of itself.

Jim Daly:

You as the 19, 20 year old, maybe 25-year-old, come back into this environment, and it’s got to be weird. Right?

Dr. Townsend:

It’s very weird. First off, they’re sort of embarrassed. I was ready to go make my move, to start my company, start a church, find the right guy or gal to get married — now all of a sudden I’m dependent again. I’m moving from independence to dependence.

The second thing is that it’s all freedom. They’ve lost freedom…. So the challenge is to be able to give them appropriate freedom in a space where there’s not as much freedom as there was, and make it work out….

(Watch the entire interview below.)

________

Learn more about how to say no and really mean it by reading The New York Times bestselling book, Boundaries.

Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post What to Do When Your Adult Children Come Home appeared first on Boundaries Books.

With college campuses closed and many entry-level jobs being impacted by the economy, adult children are moving back home with their parents. Now what?

Dr. John Townsend helps families to navigate expectations and responsibilities to set healthy boundaries and show mutual respect. He addresses communication issues and formulating and implementing a plan for rules in your home that can work for everyone.

Below is a partial transcript of part of the discussion between Jim Daly, of Focus on the Family, and Dr John Townsend, co-author of Boundaries.

Dr. Townsend:

Because of what’s happening [with Covid-19], they (young adults) are loosing jobs and they can’t be in school and they’re coming back as adults.

Basically what we have happening is a temporary reversal of God’s entire created order. Because when you look at Genesis 2, it says, what do you do when you get old enough to get out there and be autonomous, you leave and cleave. You find your own mate and social system, and career and passion. All of a sudden the breaks are on that stuff, and somebody who had these dreams to get out there and find their way … [now] I’ve got to come back to my bunker room with my bunk bed and my little brother on the bottom of it?

The reversal of the created order creates a tension in and of itself.

Jim Daly:

You as the 19, 20 year old, maybe 25-year-old, come back into this environment, and it’s got to be weird. Right?

Dr. Townsend:

it’s very weird. First off, they’re sort of embarrassed. I was ready to go make my move, to start my company, start a church, find the right guy or gal to get married — now all of a sudden I’m dependent again. I’m moving from independence to dependence.

The second thing is that it’s all freedom. They’ve lost freedom…. So the challenge is to be able to give them appropriate freedom in a space where there’s not as much freedom as there was, and make it work out.

Watch the entire interview below.

________

Learn more about how to say no and really mean it by reading The New York Times bestselling book, Boundaries.

Get The 10 Laws of Boundaries eBook when you subscribe to the Boundaries Weekly email newsletter. Learn More

The post Boundaries and COVID-19: What to Do When Your Adult Children Come Home appeared first on Boundaries Books.