Moutain, Fence, Cliff

I enjoy parenting. It is exhausting but there is real joy in the day to day moments with my kids. Last month saw a peculiar rise in parenting moments that required immediate and thorough attention. I blame this on part to my oldest son who is now officially a teenager. He has decided to test the limits of the rules we have placed around our home and call into question the motives that his parents had for creating them in the first place. I’ve come to think of this as ‘the altruism challenge’ — your kids are checking if you are in this for them. The problem is that they might not fully understand the reason for the rule and thus need to trust in your character as a parent. I wonder if many teenage and parent struggles could be addressed if the parents really had a moment to introspect and see if they had their child’s best interests in mind.

But I digress - I have been using a model for morality that I find quite helpful. It is an amalgamation of other’s ideas, those of whom I will try to recognize, but I am unaware of this exact configuration in other parenting works. The model involves an imaginary mountain. This mountain is on its own and surrounded entirely by a deep cliff that drops into nothingness. We are placed on this mountain and for fear of one day falling into the surrounding cliff construct a circular fence. The mountain in this analogy is the virtue that is to be sought while the cliff is the pit of vice. The fence is the delimiter that we have personally cordoned off so that we are protected from danger.

So it is just these three simple items: the mountain, the fence, and the cliff.

Kids are prone to think of the fence. This is the rule that protects. Perhaps it has an error or miscalculation within it. But the fence doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s just an arbitrary line. What is more important is the mountain. This is the virtue to which we are trying to point them towards. As a parent I don’t want to simply say no to more ice cream. I want to point towards healthy living.

This is nothing new of course. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics taught about virtues and vices. He taught that for every virtue there was an excess and deficiency that could occur. As an example let’s use the virtue of modesty. In excess a person might be so shy that it hinders their ability to be comfortable. Whereas in deficiency a person could be shameless and not show consideration to personal decency. Although the category of excess and deficiency is helpful for those of us that like to make tables. (I am one of them) I find this has not helped practically when talking with my children about rules. I do use the middle of the road analogy for many decisions with them but when they are challenged with a specific issue this seems less helpful.

I attended a parenting conference with my wife Deana and listened to Paul Tripp discuss a similar fence analogy with specific attention to teenagers. He said that teenagers like to take their face and squish it as tight to the fence as they can while still technically staying in bounds. The point of this behavior is that although technically correct it is incorrect from the perspective of core beliefs. The fence is to keep you from falling in but the goal is to climb the mountain. So you are technically inside the zone but your trajectory is wrong.

This simple tool comes up often in our discussions. “You are focusing on the fence” is shorthand for someone who is nitpicking a rule and ignoring the substance of the matter. Trying to prevent negative or immoral activities should always be secondary to the desire to achieve positive or good behavior.