Kids need unconditional love — not boundary-less love

Wt’s the first month of the COVID-19 lockdown and 16-year-old Avi wants his parents to buy him a Nintendo Switch because he’s bored.

“We’ll get it for you,” says his mother, “but you must sign a contract committing to certain conditions. Like, you can’t be on it for more than two hours a day, and the Internet part has to be disabled.”

The backtalk commences.

“Only two hours a day?” Avi splutters. “During lockdown — that’s nothing! What will I do the rest of the time?”

Call in on your classes’ phone conferences and maybe learn something? his mother would like to suggest, but she knows better than to go there.

“Okay, I hear you,” she says instead, “but let’s start with two hours and see how it goes. I think that’s a fair amount of time to start with.”

Avi is stomping his feet and muttering about his dysfunctional parents who just don’t care about him. And Mom feels herself relenting. Maybe I am being unreasonable, she thinks to herself. Maybe two hours is really too short a time during lockdown. Who knows what he’ll get involved with if I don’t get him the Nintendo?

No! She tries to strengthen her resolve, and reiterates, “Let’s start with two hours and see how that goes.”

But Avi has caught the indecision in his mother’s voice and is off and running. “If you really loved me,” he shouts, “you’d just give it me and I wouldn’t have to sign a dumb contract.”

Mom’s resolve is crumbling. Does Avi really think I don’t love him?

“Honey, you know that more than two hours a day isn’t good for your brain,” she says, taking one last stab. “We’ll start at two hours and work it from there.”

“I have nothing to do all day! What’s two hours? You just don’t get it. You really just don’t care.”

“Okay, three hours a day then. Will that work for you?”

“Four.”

“Okay, four, but that’s it and there’s no negotiating for more after that.”

“No problem.”

Avi is happy now. Mom is not.

All I want is for my children to grow up normal and happy and know how much I love them, laments Avi’s mom. Okay, and I’d like them to love me as well. That’s not too much to ask for. Is it?

It shouldn’t be.

Yet there are many parents struggling out there just like Avi’s mom. Their greatest hope is to have healthy, loving relationships with their children, and their children to have healthy relationships with others. They think they know how to accomplish this goal: by showering their children with unconditional love, just like all the parenting experts and books advise.

Yet despite all the love poured into their children, somehow, somewhere, things have taken a wrong turn. Their kids don’t speak respectfully. They have an outsized sense of entitlement. They act out. They’re more concerned with themselves and their emotions than with the feelings of others. They lack maturity and healthy independence.

Bewildered, the parents sift through memories of the past, trying to figure out where the connection went awry, desperate to untangle the strands of thread from the mass of knots the relationship has become.

But there’s rarely a simple answer. The parent-child relationship is so complex, there might be dozens of reasons why the situation deteriorated as it did. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that at the root of many unhealthy parent-child relationships is a flawed understanding of unconditional love — which, when not practiced appropriately, can easily morph into what experts call boundary-less love.

True Love

Let’s start with getting our definitions correct.

“Unconditional love means to love someone for who they are and not for what they do,” says Batya Ruddell, certified narrative therapist, Hamodia columnist, and author of seven books including her latest, entitled On Their Derech.

“For example, a child might feel that his parents only love him when he does something that pleases them, like doing well on a test. For that day or two, his parents will be happy with him. But as soon as he does something they don’t like, he’ll feel their rejection.

“My mantra with my children has always been; ‘I don’t always like what you do, but I always love who you are.’ This draws the distinction between someone’s behavior and their essence.”

Unconditional love is not something you “bring in” when there’s a problem, Batya stresses. “It’s something a child should receive from the cradle.”