Parenting Teens Article - Looking for a Fence
By Les Johnson
You’re doing children a favor when you establish and enforce rules for them to follow and respect.
On the farm where I spent my youth, I noticed that the first thing the cattle did when they were let out in the spring was to head for the nearest fence. They leaned on it, march along it, crawled through it or jumped over it. There was no apparent reason for their action since the other side of the fence was summer fallow ~ sandy, dry, indigestible summer fallow.
I believe my father correctly psychoanalyzed the addition of the cattle. They were looking for a fence. They wanted to find out as quickly as they could just how far they could go. They wanted to find the limitations of their newfound freedom.
After years of teaching, I have come to the conclusions that people especially young people, have that same natural urge to find the fence. In adults we call it the urge to explore, and we say it is wonderful. Most psychologists admire this quality in children, and so do I. But what most psychologists and many parents forget is that there must be a fence to limit the exploration. Cattle will not prosper if they spend much of their time crawling through a fence or unhappily staring down at dusty summer fallow. They will be as unhappy as the child who can’t find the borders of his existence.
How secure is it to look across your yard in the spring and think that from here to there is mine! How happy is the crawling baby to find the comforting four walls of his home! How confident and secure is the youth who can say to himself, “This, this and this I can do ~ but that I cannot do!”
How miserably uncomfortable is the child who cannot find his fence! He is the wild young boy who runs away from home. She is the wayward girl who finds her fence too late. He is the juvenile delinquent who gets arrested for stealing cigarettes, cars, and money from milk bottles. He is the ‘bad boy’ who cripples himself (and maybe others) for life going 90 miles an hour down a residential street; who tears trees and flowers from public parks; who breaks into a house and rips up furniture with a knife. He is the delinquent whose only real crime is in not being able to find his fence. In his mind is that horrible turmoil of a picture reaching out to find its frame.
In my classroom I have students whose parents have all but disowned them. They have given up trying to understand them. Yet, after a week or two these young people are no trouble at all.
What marvelous pedagogical discovery did I make to accomplish this miracle? I applied a lesson I learned from my father, who had never heard of pedagogy ~ or psychology, either. He simple electrified the fence.
Within a few days the cattle knew where the fence was and they stayed away from it. They grazed contentedly and became fat and healthy. At the time it seemed to me to be a waste of power to leave the charger running when no animal came near it. My father shut it off and set me to watch.
Within an hour a steer came up to test the fence. He was looking for security. There was no shock. He looked back at the herd. He was confused. He jumped the fence. Had I not been there, others would have soon followed.
This is why I tell the students on the first day of school what I expect of them and what the rules are. Some try breaking the rules just to see if the fence means anything. When they find that things are as they were told, they forget about breaking the rules. They can now work contentedly and happily, secure in knowing that the rules are there and that they can depend on them.
Now and then a potential delinquent tests them just to see. So it is most important that the charger stays on. Nothing must happen to break the confidence, the trust, or the security that has been developed.
Do my students object to being in this state of ‘rigid control’ that hampers their zeal to explore?
One boy, who had been in trouble several times, told me, “I wish everybody was as easy to get along with as you.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel so solid here. I know what will happen I feel free to do things.”
No one likes to live in a country where there are frequent revolutions and accompanying insecurity that make the valued things of today the trash of tomorrow. Insecurity is detrimental to all progressive work. A game is ruined when the referee neglects to enforce the rules ~ just once.
I recall a parent coming to see me after school one afternoon. As the student left the room at the close of the class she came up to my desk, an expression of amazement on her face.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“I’ve seen all those ruffians hanging around the drugstore at night. I’ve seen them on the street corners. I must confess I’m afraid to let Tommy out at night for fear that he will be just like them. Yet, from the back of the room there, they seemed as nice as you please. They talk, but when it gets too noisy you look up and they quit just like you had punished them or something. According to my son’s references to your strictness, I half expected you to be some sort of tyrant. But this I did not expect. How do you do it?
“They know where the fence is. Inside the fence they are free. But they know they must not cross that fence.”
“Well, it is nice to know that somebody can beat these fellows down.”
“I don’t think I’ve ‘beaten’ them down’ as you call it. We have a few simple, well-understood rules that keep us from infringing on the rights of others and that kept us safe and free. I help them follow those rules. There is no “beating down’ in that. Rather, it is uplifting to equal dignity.”
“Maybe,” she smiled, “but I did see some of them chewing gum. I didn’t think schools tolerated that.”
“I used to refuse permission for gum, too, but that was a rule that didn’t work too well. When the air was dry and their throats were sore, somehow it didn’t seem so wrong to chew gum. So rather than have a useless rule that tempted breaking, we decided to change the rule. But if the chewing annoys anyone, we stop it.”
“You say ‘we’ all the time.”
“That’s who the rules are for.”
“I see”, she nodded and began on her own problems. “You know, Tommy has me worried. Any advice?”
“Tommy is a fine boy. He has a problem or two of his own, you know. To an adolescent like Tom, life is a business of being halfway to nowhere. It’s little else but a period of confusion and doubts. He needs firm, dependable security.”
“I agree. From now on I’m going to use stricter discipline on him. He’s going to be in by eight on school nights and nine on weekends.”
“I think that would be a mistake. You are fencing him in too much. He will have no alternative but to jump out. That’s not strictness. That is constrict-ness. You would rebel too, if the walls were pushed in on you so close that they stifled.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“If I were you, I’d sit down with Tom or, better yet, I’d get your husband and the two of you together…”
“My Husband thinks Tommy will grow out of it.”
“Maybe he will’ but, in the mean time, it will be a very lonesome, unhappy time for him when it ought to be a happy time. And he may not ‘grow out of it’ before a lot of harm is done and many bad habits are formed.”
“You think both of us should talk with Tommy?”
Yes, that, in itself, is a pretty good start on a secure fence.
Then build the rest of the fence with Tom. Make it comfortable for him-not so big that he gets lost in it and has doubt that it is there, yet not so small he can’t move around and grow. Then it is up to you as parents to simply help him stay within those walls. When he is ready, he will build his own fence and live in peace with the rest of his society.”
“How will we know when he is ready?”
“If you have helped him with this fence and if he has found that staying inside it is good for both comfort and progress, he will ask you.
He will ask because he has learned to trust you as one who helps, rather than detesting you as one who doesn’t care where he wanders or hating you because you have fenced him in too tightly.”
“I wish I had thought of this years ago.”
“It would have been easier, but it’s never too late to build a fence. Of course, it’s a little harder to get used to, but within his fence Tom will grow up to be a secure, confident, well adjusted young man. He’s worth the trouble!”
From: SCOUTING
December 1964 pp 14, 15, 27
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