"Rules" are Largely Irrelevant in Collaborative Relationships

When my kids were 12 and 15, we were approved to become an unrestricted foster home for teens 12 and up through DCF.  When we received our first placement, a 12 year old girl, her social worker wanted us to list our “family rules” and “define boundaries.”  The problem was, we didn’t have any rules, other than “don’t eat on the couch,” which was ironic, considering how disdainful I feel about the idea of rules.  (But it was new, and pretty, and I didn’t want to cover it up, and don’t I deserve to have nice things too?)  In retrospect, it would have been better to find a way around even that one rule, because my solution to enforcement ended up being “nagging” and I’m not a fan of putting myself in that “nag position”.  When collaborating with my kids to find solutions for any problem over the years, my one mantra has been “I won’t agree to anything that turns me into a nag”; the trial solution to a problem cannot be “I remind you incessantly until you get it done.” 

The kids all tried to meet me halfway on the couch rule, but it was essentially an exercise in frustration, because it was important to no one but me. Five years later, everyone just eats on the couch and whatever will be will be.  But at the time, it was kind of awkward, trying to explain our philosophy to that social worker. What do you mean, your only rule is “don’t eat on the couch?” What do you mean, you have no rules? What do you mean, “collaborative?” Pretty sure you meant to say “permissive.”  

I tried to explain that we have expectations like “get up and go to school, do enough homework to not fail”, in an effort to make her see we were not the ineffective and oblivious parents she seemed to think we were. I was exaggerating, though in calling what we had "expectations", I was upselling, a little embarrassed at how loosey goosey it all must have seemed, worried about the judgment of this DCF worker who was so focused on defining the rules of engagement and enforcement.

In reality I think it’s more accurate to say we had “hopes” for school, but if those things didn’t happen, my response would not be to say “you need to do this because I said so, because I expect it and so it is not negotiable”, but more like “what’s going on, how can I help, what is it you need support with right now?  How can I make this easier for you?”  

And if there were still resistance, then I’d still not insist on compliance, I’d still not make it a “rule.”  Instead, I’d back it up even further, thinking about things like. What are your goals, what is it you want to do here? What are your hopes for yourself, and how can I help you meet those hopes? You set the terms of your own life, not me. For some kids, traditional schooling is the problem, not the solution, so “you must go to school and do your work” wouldn’t make sense, not even as a hope.  And that’s okay, there’s more than one path to learning (so long as we are not focused on “enforcing rules”.) 

Lia’s* social worker gave up on the idea of “figuring out our rules” and over time, she stopped worrying about defining any of it, because she wasn’t concerned about how Lia was doing.  Lia was doing well, and feeling in charge of her own life. I'm pretty sure that the social worker thought our whole approach was highly suspicious, but so long as there were no problems or complaints, she largely left us alone to our relaxed (and as far as she could determine, lawless) household.  

The truth is, it’s somewhere between hard to impossible to explain collaborative methods to someone who has never encountered them, someone who thinks “I tell you what to do and of course you do it” is a reasonable and necessary expectation to have with any child.  If you’re the parent of a PDA’er, I’m sure the thought of approaching your child with such a rigid “because I said so” mindset just made you wince.  It’s the equivalent of declaring war instead of focusing on the possibility of a peace treaty.  And in any war, we can believe we deserve to win the war as much as we like, we can believe our cause is just and sound, but one person’s belief is not the other side’s reality.  If our child is a PDA'er, they are unlikely to agree with us in any way, other than to agree that we are in fact opponents, locked on conflict, and the scales of justice must be balanced.  “War” is the unconscious path of least resistance, the path of “how can I force him to…” and ironically, the surest path to everyone losing.  

There is never a winner in any war, only different gradients of losing. The same is true for living with or teaching PDA’ers: when we approach with a control based mindset, we are setting everyone up for failure.  It is instead our job to figure out how to engage in effective “ongoing peace treaties” with our kids, and to develop and model lifelong collaborative skills.  

*not her real name