HEALTH PLUS:Do rules undermine a child's personality, stifle individuality or constrict creativity, writes Marie Murray
CHILDREN LIKE rules. They like fair rules imposed fairly. Children, even young children, understand rules. They believe in them.
They make up rule-based games of their own. A game without rules is not a game. It cannot be played because nobody would know what to do, when to take their turn and if they had won or lost. Good rules make things fair.
When choosing teams for a game, children have been found to show a preference for other children who understand complex rules and who keep them. They are more likely to play with a child who can devise a rule-based game and they will exclude children who break rules because that "ruins the game" which is a capital offence in the child's world.
Children understand the logic of rules in group activities. They like rules that are clear, comprehensible, impartial, equitable, consistent and with known consequences that are appropriate. As they learn about the world, they need conceptual frameworks by which to do so.
Rules provide this. Rules essentially say this is the plan, this is how it works, this is what you do, this is what you do not do and this is what happens next. To the child that kind of information is helpful and reassuring.
Rules make children feel secure. They like parents to decide upon them, explain them, model them and expect them to be adhered to. Rules are a reference point.
Even if rules are challenged, children like to have them to challenge. Rules delineate routine. Children love routine provided it is not so rigid and inflexible that it is can never be broken for special circumstances.
That is why even behavioural rules that are kicked against serve an important function, because there is something to kick against from the safety of knowing that someone cares about you enough to devise rules for you.
For example, no rules about bedtime deprive children of the opportunity to bargain with parents about it: a childhood activity that most of us remember as the beginning of our debating and negotiating skills.
How to devise an argument, present it in a reasonable manner, judge when to accept defeat and when there is a margin of possibility are skills acquired in childhood and required throughout life.
Children learn these things as they comply with, consider and eventually challenge parental rules: an important developmental process for them which is denied by chaotic structures.
Children like to know what is expected of them. It is frightening for children if behaviour that is acceptable one day is punished the next. That is unfair and if there is one single intolerable experience in childhood it is unfairness. It is the ultimate affront to the child's belief system. Things must be fair.
Up to the age of five or six children tend to view rules as fixed. That is why they are so shocked if someone tries to break a rule. "You're not allowed!" they will warn each other. In the words of the famous developmental psychologist Piaget, children are "moral absolutists".
If a parent emits an expletive when the rules say you can't say certain words, children are the most likely to point this out in shocked, self-righteous tones. Parents are not meant to break rules, lie or use any curse the child is prohibited from using.
Things are either right or wrong in the child's view. Things are either good or evil as evident in their fairy tales and there is no middle ground. You are a witch or a princess, a fairy godmother or a cruel stepmother, a beauty or a beast.
Psychology has provided and debunked many theories in relation to rules. Freudian theory saw conscience as the mechanism to resolve inner and internal conflict whereas subsequent theorists emphasised the child's incorporation of the parental value system out of love rather than anxiety. Social learning theorists emphasise that role of familial and cultural identification and that children feel rewarded when they adopt the value system of those around them.
There has been inappropriate fear about the imposition of rules on children, as if they undermine the personality of the child, stifle individuality, constrict creativity, reduce initiative and threaten self-esteem.
This is not so. Children need decisions to be made for them before they can make them safely for themselves.
Age-appropriate and equitably applied rules keep children safe and make them feel secure by certainty into an uncertain world.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the student counselling services in UCD