Why Rules Matter
Why adults set rules for themselves, why giving our kids too many rules can backfire, and why this all comes down to developing a vision of what it means to live a good life.
Hello, good people!
Last year I started a high school men’s program. The Order of Arete, as I’ve named our group, convenes every Tuesday morning at 6 am. We begin by taking a three-minute cold plunge in 47 degree water. After that, the guys change clothes and we meet to discuss a reading or podcast that I’ve assigned. Topics range widely but they are all related to the question: what does it mean to live well and to be a good man in the modern context? If interested, I’d be happy to share the manual I put together.
A few weeks ago, I assigned two short readings: a summary of each chapter of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and a summary of the 20 rules from Ethan Hawke’s Rules for a Knight. These readings spurred a great conversation about why successful people set rules for themselves. To answer that, first it is helpful to think about why we set rules for our children…
The Dream of All Children
Perhaps the most ubiquitous fantasy among young children is to imagine what they will do when they grow up and no longer have any rules. Kids yearn for adulthood so that they can stay out as late as they want, watch as much television as they want, and eat whatever they like.
They want freedom but are not yet capable of handling it. So, we parent.
We set bedtimes. We discourage screentime. We limit desserts and restrict what foods are available in the house. We assign chores, prioritize homework, and insist that our kids apologize when they’re wrong. We set all manner of expectations acting as the governor and the compass for our children, while they slowly develop their own.
Kids think that they can’t wait to become adults so that they can have donuts for breakfast and candy for dinner every night. What they don’t yet understand is that becoming an adult is about becoming the type of person who has the self-control not to use their freedom like a child.
As adults, the only rules we have to follow are those set by the government (and, perhaps, our wives). We have an immense amount of freedom… and temptation.
Without discipline, that freedom would become a curse. We’d quickly find that our lives were out of control—that we had become something that we didn’t like and that our child selves would be ashamed of.
This isn’t to insinuate that as mature adults we never binge a show or treat ourselves to Crumbl Cookies. But adulthood is about having the discipline to, more often, delay gratification on behalf of grander ideals. Adulthood is about deciding what type of person you want to be and developing the capacity to do what it takes to approach that ideal.
Why Adults Make Rules For Themselves
Adults make rules for themselves in order to confront the gap between the person that we want to be and the lesser version of ourselves that we would be if impulse ran our lives. We make rules for ourselves because we aspire to be a certain type of person and to behave in a certain way, but we also recognize the limits of our good intentions. Our experience has shown us that, without intentional constraints, we have a tendency to overindulge and underperform. So, we make rules for ourselves:
… I’m only going to allow myself one treat per week…
…I will only drink on Saturday evenings…
…I will meditate and do my gratitude practice every morning before I look at my phone…
…I will workout before breakfast….
Search your life and I imagine that you have more little rules and guidelines than you might even be aware of. Many will be uncodified and unstated, but they guide you nonetheless: …hug my kids and ask about their day when I come through the door… tell my wife I love her before bed… greet people with a smile and connect with servers, grocery store workers, or anyone else I encounter…
Every impressive person I know has a host of rules they impose on themselves. They don’t do this to limit themselves, but, rather, to free themselves from the tyranny of their own impulses. Self-imposed rules are the guardrails that keep us on track, moving us toward the ideal that we want to embody. They free us to live a richer life. And they are, almost always, the product of adult expectations set long ago.
I don’t want to make this too simple. No upbringing fully prepares kids for adulthood. A large part of what helped us mature into adults was the inevitable succession of mistakes that we made along the way where we experienced the pain of our poor discipline. Whether it is the pain of going to work after staying out too late, or the pain of letting a loved one down, life’s feedback plays a crucial role in our maturity.
But we are only likely to appreciate that feedback if we have been primed to by good role models, clear expectations, and experiences where discipline is demanded of us. In other words, if we didn’t learn that discipline matters, we are far less likely to make rules for ourselves.
The Problem With Too Many Rules
As always, there is a bit of nuance needed in this discussion. It would be easy to presume, based on what I’ve argued so far, that we need to create a strict, rule-laden environment for our children. But we get very different advice in this excerpt from David Epstein’s fantastic book, Range:
In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but easy to thwart. He pointed to a study that found an average of six household rules for typical children, compared to one in households with extremely creative children. The parents with creative children made their opinions known after their kids did something they didn’t like, they just did not proscribe it beforehand. Their households were low on prior restraint.”
I love that Grant highlights that parents still corrected their children after their kids did something they didn’t like, but that the correction was specific to the event rather than a universal proclamation. The expectations existed and were enforced, but they weren’t codified in such a way as to promote thoughtless obedience.
It makes sense that having fewer-prescribed rules would breed kids with a far more sophisticated view of the world. Unconsciously, these kids would begin to develop a sense for social rules that are far too nuanced and extensive to explicitly outline. Things like, you don’t interrupt people when they are talking, except perhaps in a playful setting with a well-timed joke. Or, you don’t ask “why” when a parent or teacher asks you to clean up, but there are many times when it is important to ask adults “why,” and those whys might be better received when asked one-on-one, rather than in a social setting.
Social skills, such as these, tend to be highly intuitive and impossible to codify into clearly defined rules.
Making Sense of All This
So, we have to give our kids boundaries when they are young so that they learn discipline and grow up with the capacity and the inclination to make rules for themselves. But we don’t want to demand too many rigid rules. Rigid rules create people that are more narrow-minded, inflexible, and uncreative. Sounds like another classic parenting trap where we are doomed to mess our kids up, right?
No one is perfect. But it seems that our kids do best when they grow up with clear expectations and values, but also with the freedom to fit that vision to their own personality, hopes, and dreams.
We have to help them aspire to be something—to see a vision of what they can become that makes them want to do hard things and to set rules for themselves. This means that we have to, ourselves, have a vision of what matters that is much bigger than just being happy in any given moment. As parents, we need a vision of what it means to live a good life.
Becoming a Certain Type of Person
Most of the problems with the modern youth development paradigm stem from the absence of this vision.
When you don’t have a clear idea of what makes a person admirable…
When you don’t have a clear archetype of the type of person that you want to raise…
…someone honest, persistent, reliable, hardworking, and fun-loving…
…someone who brings energy and zest to each encounter and creates a sense of possibility among the people they work with…
…someone who isn’t limited by fears and plagued by compulsions…
…someone who knows who they are and what they stand for and who is willing to sacrifice for a larger mission…
When you don’t have that sort of vision, it is easy to just do what is easy, normal, and convenient. It is easy to solve every problem for your kids, saturate them in sugar and processed foods, and to pacify them with endless screen entertainment. If you don’t have a larger vision in mind, why go through all the trouble to teach your kids manners? Why let them figure out hard problems when it would be so easy to make them happy by solving those problems for them?
In a time when our norms seem to be propelling us towards the future imagined in Wall-E, having a vision of a certain type of person that you are raising is more important than ever.
The reason we are drawn to books like 12 Rules for Life and Rules for a Knight is because we yearn for a path that will turn us into something greater. Our children, likewise, yearn to know what they are capable of. Our children want to be great. They just want dessert for breakfast and endless video game time too. These two paths don’t overlap. It is up to us to put them on the right trajectory.
Thank you very much for reading and sharing with any kindred spirits!
Have a great week!
Shane