Adults try to stay in the lines, too

Recently I talked to a mother who showed me the Valentine her young son had made. We talked about how proud he was of the fact that he had “stayed in the lines.”

Staying in the lines represents an accomplishment to a young child, often one of the most important in their repertoire of daily behaviors. Not staying in the lines may represent messiness, a lack of caring or even failure. Internalized over a period of time, it can add to the development of a poor self-concept.

After my conversation with the parent, a parallel between a child’s view of staying in the lines and my own adult behavior became apparent.

When things haven’t gone well on a particular day and I go home to my family, the answer to their question, “How did things go today?” could be, “I didn’t stay within the lines.”

During the recent holiday season I didn’t stay within the lines. I picked up several pounds as a result of overeating and underexercising.

One of my college age children didn’t either. He talked about how he had not kept adequate records of checks he had written and had been overdrawn at the bank. (I could close my eyes, roll back 15 years and hear him saying, “I just didn’t stay in the lines, Daddy.”)

And I often hear about employer/employee situations where an employer fails to give adequate instruction or information to an employee and the result is job performance that is less than what the employer wanted. Or the employer may communicate instruction and information in a harsh judgmental and ineffective way. Or the employer may have expected the impossible. In any case, he didn’t stay in the lines.

Effective parenting dictates that a parent help a child learn to achieve a level of performance consistent with his abilities, and at the same time, assist the child in keeping less than adequate performance in perspective.

As adults, the same principle follows. Seeking improvement in our lives, whether it involves tasks, relationships or self-actualization, necessitates modifying our performance based on the feedback we receive from the situation while keeping things in perspective.

Many of us set realistic goals for our children, but fail miserably when it comes to ourselves. We seek levels of performance, expect feedback from relationships or feelings of well-being that may not be consistent with reality or the parameters of the situation which are beyond our control at any given time.

The next time you feel miserable and feel that you have failed to stay in the lines, ask yourself if your expectations were realistic and healthy, or whether you are like the 5-year-old who feels overwhelmed with feelings of failures because the crayons strayed beyond the borders.

Copyright c 1990 Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D.