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The Boundary of the Family
Love is the first gift. Before a child can speak, before it can choose, before it can understand, it must first be received. It must be held, fed, called by name. Love covers a child and carries what it cannot yet carry alone. Without love, life withers before it has begun.
And yet love alone cannot call a person forth. Some parents love deeply and never once address the child. They tend the child as one tends a garden — protecting, cultivating, deciding what it will become. That devotion is real and often sacrificial. The child learns that it is precious. What it does not learn is that its own voice carries weight, that its questions deserve answers, that its judgment can be trusted.
Respect begins where possession ends.
To respect a child is to address it instead of managing it — to see it, even in weakness, as someone standing before me rather than beneath me. Then the child’s refusal becomes something to understand rather than something to correct, and the child’s question becomes an invitation rather than an interruption. Here is why it is respect, not love, that makes growth possible. Growth is not the enlargement of what the parent gives; it is the appearance of a person who can answer for their own life.
In the autumn of 2014 my wife had to leave suddenly for Canada, and I spent more than a month alone with Kihyun. Rereading what I wrote then makes my face burn.
I wake the boy. This usually takes about ten minutes. Get it wrong and I have taken my son’s kick to the face. Then, mixing threats with coaxing, I shove food into his mouth… By the time I have washed him, fed him a snack and put him to bed, my heart and body and soul are in ruins. Why did I shout at the poor child? Why did I smack his bottom? Am I going out of my mind?— 2014, Facebook
But that post did not end there. The same day I also wrote: that the time spent staring blankly at the television after putting him to bed is my healing time; that I do not know why the sleeping child is so lovely; that I pull the protesting boy into a tight embrace and fall asleep. The post ends with a sentence saying that tomorrow another day like a war begins.
This is a parent’s day. The shouting and the embrace are inside the same day. I was not first a bad father and then a good one. Love and anxiety rolled forward as one body. That is why they are so hard to tell apart.
Threats and coaxing. Those are the words I chose. Most of what I did for my son that month was management. Waking, feeding, delivering, drilling worksheets, putting to bed. Ask me whether it was love, and it was love. Only the grammar of that love was imperative.
A parent’s greatest temptation is not indifference. It is anxiety.
We are afraid the child will fail, will be hurt, will choose foolishly, will become someone we never imagined. Anxiety disguises itself as love so easily that it is rarely caught. Anxiety speaks without stopping. It corrects, reminds, warns, directs. It cannot keep silent, because silence feels like neglect.
When anxiety deepens, we begin to measure love by sacrifice. After all I have done for you. Beneath that arithmetic is an unspoken plea: I gave this much, so how can you not become the person I hoped for? From then on, love stops asking who this child is becoming and asks instead how to keep the child from becoming someone I cannot handle. The child is deeply loved but not fully trusted. Protected, but not permitted to become.
In Cambridge in 2018 that anxiety burst once.
Kihyun starts talking to me. Answering him, I hit the construction barrier on the left. The left side of the car is crumpled. Kihyun says something. Shut up. I catch myself shouting.— 2018, Facebook
It was not anger at my son. It was the anxiety of a strange country, the pressure of being the head of a household, research that would not go as I wished, the shame of watching my step in a room shared with forty or fifty people. All of it burst at once in the instant the car crumpled, and it burst, of all people, on the one nearest to me. That night I stood a long time outside my son’s door, then went in and said I was sorry. The hardest part was resisting the urge to attach a “but” after the apology. The moment that one word is attached, an apology becomes an excuse.
So respect is harder than love. Love comes naturally to anyone who feels responsible; love acts, and acting reassures us. Respect is different. It demands that we believe a person’s life is made solid not by control but by the freedom to answer. And it tells us to wait. Waiting is frightening, because from the inside it looks exactly like doing nothing.
The fear is not groundless. The boundary is a dangerous place, and some children stand there far less steadily. Watching an unsteady child move toward the edge, a parent wants to block the way, and mostly does. But a child carried across the boundary into someone’s arms every time never learns to stand at a boundary, and before long the boundary comes to that child alone. The parent’s place is not on the edge but just behind it — close enough to catch, far enough that the standing belongs to the child.
What should be adjusted for a struggling child is not respect but weight. A challenge beyond what a child has does not grow the child; it breaks the child. The hormesis of Chapter Six is here translated into the language of parenting: just short of killing. But when the weight is heavy, the answer is to reduce the weight, not to reduce the trust. To one child you entrust the direction of a life; to another, which problem to start with today. The sizes differ; the entrusting does not.
The boundary is dangerous and, at the same time, the only place where anything is born. In the safe middle nothing is born.
A parent’s real skill is not pulling the child away from the edge but leaving that edge just dangerous enough to remain a place where something is born.
What took longest in writing this chapter was not a concept but admitting one thing. I tried to manage my son. And I know why. Because that is how I was raised.
My elementary school records carried the tag “grades satisfactory but attention scattered.” In middle school it became “grades poor and attention scattered.” An umbrella or a thermos lunchbox taken out in the morning rarely came home again. I was a child to be corrected. Only past forty did I call myself by a new name.
Doctors call people like me attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and file us under a category. But God calls people like us this: Active, Diligent, Highly-sensitive, Delightful. I am a proud ADHD.— 2014, Facebook
It took me forty years to say that to myself. And what was I doing to a son of the same temperament? Waking him, feeding him, drilling worksheets. Trying to correct him. The very sentence I had hated hearing all my life, I had become a father and was handing down to my son.
Love says: I will not leave you. Respect says: I trust you enough to let you stand on your own. Either one alone is not enough. Love without respect becomes possession; respect without love becomes distance. One suffocates, the other abandons. Only when the two dwell within each other does either become whole. This is the form the perichoresis of Chapter Thirteen takes at the closest range. Love receives a person; respect lets a person go.
In Chapter Ten I wrote, seeing my son off at the airport, that the worry and anger decreased while the joy decreased markedly. At the time I thought of it as loss. Now I read it differently. That empty place is not a place lost but a place released. The deepest calling of parenthood is probably this: not to raise a child who survives, nor a child who succeeds, but to stay beside a person until they can stand before the world and answer in their own name. Not in fear but in freedom: I am who I am.
Notes for this chapter
The author’s unpublished essay “Love Keeps a Child Alive; Respect Lets a Child Become” · The author’s Facebook record (2014, 2018) · On perichoresis see Chapter Thirteen; on bearable weight see Chapter Six