appropriate parameters

I’m sitting here at Panera in Lake Mary working online. I’m right next to a window and watching a potentially disturbing scenario unfold. Out in a concrete courtyard are two mothers sitting on a bench watching their two daughters, who can’t be older than two and a half, run around and play. Granted, that in and of itself is not disturbing. But the fact that they are precariously toddling up and down the concrete stairway, doing technical maneuvers up the handrails, and otherwise engaged in unrestrained activities around the 3 foot stone wall overlooking a thin patch of landscape connected to the brick portion of the terrace, is what makes me nervous and a bit disturbed. Now their mothers are watching them, but it’s as if their egging them on. I could be an overprotective parent, but these kids are one slip shy of pulling a humpty dumpty. And this scenario certainly does not qualify for my last post, “When falling feels good”.

Parameters. Perhaps we’ve lost our sense as a society what is appropriate behavior and what is not. Perhaps we’re so fixated on our freedoms that the concept has completely gone out the window. This extends far beyond children playing in a concrete courtyard. Obviously that was just a metaphor, but it seems fitting, given the fact that our sense of right and wrong – our ethics are established at a very young age. We pushed the boundaries as children in order to figure out where, in fact, they were. Sometimes, we pushed hard, and if our parents gave way, we determined where the soft spots were. Family experts tell us if they (boundaries) were solid (but not rigid or abusive) then we as children had more security, stability in our family life. If they were not, and we got away with more than we should have or our parents caved at every cry, then subconsciously we figured out that they were not in control – we were, which is not very comforting for a child. Consistency is one of the major keys to good parenting. Likewise in our society consistency should be the key to a good government, education, and penal system. We’re not talking rigid or dictatorial here, but rather systems that demonstrate consequences for good and bad behavior will be appropriately and consistently handled the same way. There should be no doubt in the mind of a child or a citizen that boundaries are solid and are there for a reason.