3 Damage Caused By Obsession With Parental Control

Many parents have trouble growing up with their children and letting them little by little take control of their lives. The objective of a good education is none other than to transmit the best values ​​and customs while children mature and prepare for autonomy. But let’s not forget the ultimate goal and that the process has to be gradual.

However, some parents, in fear of the dangers they perceive in the world, abuse parental control to protect their children and quickly remove them from any potentially dangerous source, real or imagined. On the other hand, these types of fears and the way to face them often have to do with the education that parents have received.

There is no doubt that controlling children is very tempting. At the end of the day, this way it is easier to survive day to day, not for a reason there is the saying that “prevention is better than cure”. But nobody said that education was an easy or comfortable thing. In fact, it is getting more and more difficult. 

While a little control is good, obsessing over it isn’t just bad for your kids. It is also devastating for parents, who carry a great weight, a great responsibility and, what can be worse, a great guilt on their shoulders.

An obsession with parental control can make your child rebel

Rebellion is almost natural, it is part of the autonomy process itself. But, there are ways and ways to rebel. It is not the same to rebel against the world as against your parents. It is not the same to rebel against the system imposed by the State than against the rules imposed at home.

Children need a certain level of freedom. If you try to control all aspects of their lives they will claim their autonomy even more strongly and probably less successfully. If a parent insists on controlling what the child has to play at, what clothes to wear, what book to read or things like that, he will make his child rebel sooner or later.

Obviously, as a parent you have to supervise certain things and guide your child, ensuring that he makes a coherent and appropriate decision. But from there to always impose your criteria there is still a stretch. Let your child make his own decisions and, if you disagree, ask him to justify his decision. If you consider his decision to be wrong, guide him, help him choose better, consider the consequences of his decisions and let him suffer the consequences, as long as his health and safety are not really endangered.

Your creativity will be daunted

If you constantly monitor what your child does and become his shadow, he will probably be less creative.  The fact of not being validated to make decisions by people as important to him as his parents, will inevitably make him feel insecure when he has to make them and allow time to decide for him if no one encourages him to follow what he has decided.

If this does not seem important to you, perhaps it is because you are one of those who thinks that creativity is a useless thing or that it only serves to make beautiful drawings, write surprising texts or decorate the house with more or less grace. But being creative is much more than that.

Creativity is the ability to seek different solutions to the problems posed, the ability to rethink these problems, the ability to see things differently . By being creative you can not only do great things, but you can be great, very great, overcome your problems and adversities and become what you want to be. Are you going to deny that to your son?

Don’t tell him how to do it right. Give your child the opportunity to find his solution, to see the different ways to solve a problem, to pose it, to expand it. And if you solve the problem, what difference does it make how you did it. The important thing is that he did it and found the solution. Understand naturally that from time to time they may be right and even have a more advantageous point of view than yours.

Excess control will make your child nervous

Too much control works for your child’s mind like a cage of limited dimensions through which he can barely move. Imagine yourself locked up without knowing why in a 5 square meter room that you cannot get out of.

How long would it take you to start walking anxiously, side to side, trying to get out of there? That is the anxiety that your child experiences when you control every minute of the day, when you organize every moment and when you do not leave space for himself.

Do not think that because you feed the perception of having everything under control, you are in control. When that door opens because your child is too big to be contained behind it, when he pulls it down himself you will see that you have not controlled anything, that what crosses the threshold is a nervous person, anxious to do just the opposite of what you told him, but without the ability to decide consistently.