I have heard about little kids begin to “Test Boundaries” and it often seems to me to be assumed this is a result of sinful tendencies towards disobedience. But there is another side to the story, it seems to me, that I recently thought of as I watched a little kid doing something that his parents have repeatedly told him not to do and which he has been spanked for doing.
Imagine from the kid’s point of view, here are balls, blocks, ropes, various toys, food, random things on the ground etc. Any of them he fancies he can go and touch and interact with. Yet slowly he starts to realize some things are different. Some things he is told “no” when we touches them. Then he gets spanks for touching them. Yes this is painful, but how interesting! These things are very different from other things. But then again sometimes he can touch them with no effect. Sometimes his parents give it to him, other times they say “no” and spank him. What is this thing?!?! It is not just the object itself, for it is not always a NO object. There is something else going on.
To a kid I imagine some vague glimmer of the idea of an invisible forcefield surrounding certain objects. No you, an adult, if all of a sudden you opened the cupboard and when you tried to reach your hand in and as you passed the plane of the closed cupboard door if you got a zap and voices rang out from the house, you would be amazed! Yes it might hurt a little, but wow, and invisible forcefield, what an interesting object! I cant see it, yet when I get close to it, there are shocking effects. This mirrors the first experience of electricity, yes it shocks, but it is amazing. We touch electric fences even though we know it will hurt, but we still touch out of curiosity about such a new kind of reality.
So with the child, when he begins to understand no, knows it will result in pain, nevertheless is probably drawn to the uniqueness of this reality–the invisible forcefield of the parent’s will, which they place where they will and inform the child when he is about to transgress. So far before the child becomes aware of some moral concern, he has the very understandable fascination with such a fascinating reality. So this “testing boundaries” is not only a euphemism for rebellion and seeing if the parents will crack under the strain, it is a legitimate experimental procedure carried out by the child in scientific fashion–probing and prodding this thing to see what it will do.
They do just as I would do if I poked out my finger into the air and got a sharp sting from some invisible reality. I would keep doing it until the pain overcame the curiosity. But I would still want to know why and what it was, even if it was too painful to keep experimenting. This explanation will come later for the child, once they can understand the reason for the prohibition. Once they understand this, then the testing is no longer amoral–it is testing the parents in the evil sense. But before this stage, testing boundaries seems to me to be a sign of healthy curiosity rather than a sign of a rebellious spirit. They are beginning to become familiar with the moral world of invisible yet very important realities that are to guide decision and action.
As to how this practically would affect disciplinary strategies, I do not know. It might be that the pain needs to be upped so that the balance of curiosity is quickly outweighed by pain. But maybe this should only be done for select things that are especially dangerous, and let less important things remain an outlet for their curiosity and with less severe punishment for transgression. Not sure. Maybe this invisible, moral reality would actually be better taught and learned if any transgression was always met with quick severe effect. Games or such things may be another way to let them become familiar with invisible realities but not in a moral context–like tag or something has the invisible reality of being “it.”
