Life & Therapy

As a mother of a toddler, I hear myself saying things like, “If you head-butt Mommy again, you can’t sit in Mommy’s lap anymore.” This is a rule that I regularly enforce, and enforcing it is easier because she knows that rule exists ahead of time. Our child also has rules that we need to follow as well, but she doesn’t know how to communicate them yet. We let her know our rules in advance; we find out her rules after we’ve unwittingly broken them. For example, one of her rules is “If you take something away from me without warning, I will have a tantrum.” She’s never told us this ahead of time; she lets us know about this rule by having the justifiable tantrum if it is broken.

We all have rules about how we want to be treated in a relationship. Most of us probably have reacted to a broken rule after the fact, rather than having communicated that rule in advance. This approach makes things much more messy and painful. If we react angrily when our partner breaks an unexpressed rule, we are behaving like emotional toddlers. It may feel more difficult to describe the rules in advance, but it truly is the adult thing to do.