It’s easy enough to understand how a harsh upbringing might leave someone afraid to set healthy boundaries. The people who once held power over them, authoritarian parents or teachers, rude older kids, bullies they were frightened to cross, had the power to control, belittle, punish, and humiliate, and standing up to them was likely to bring down an avalanche of worse treatment. Frustrating as it is, the default becomes letting others sway their judgement, their feelings, their needs, their choices. And after years of being told how to behave, think, and feel, some struggle even to recognise when someone is overstepping.
But there’s a much wider group, people who’d describe themselves as confident, who still struggle with boundaries, at least now and then. Why do so many find it hard to say ‘no’, or ‘not cool’, or ‘thanks for the advice, but I’ll do it my own way’? Two reasons, as simple as they are mundane: niceness and politeness. The more agreeable simply feel bad about putting someone in their place, even when they’ve earned it. Then there are those who are reasonably agreeable but not especially empathetic, who wouldn’t feel bad about telling it straight, except that it wouldn’t be polite. Upsetting someone, or being seen as rude, feels like a serious transgression, one some people won’t commit even to defend themselves. The result? Others exploit the politeness, the goodwill, and the reluctance to say no.
To see where all this begins, look at how we learn boundaries in the first place. In the classical developmental view, babies are not born with a clear sense of themselves as separate from their caregivers and everything else. In the first two years of life they start crawling, walking away and back to their parents, and understanding language: they name themselves and learn what is theirs, what is others’, and so on. Before the age of two, toddlers recognise themselves in the mirror. Margaret Mahler called separation-individuation the phase when a toddler starts becoming a person (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975). By the age of two or three, toddlers know who they are, what is theirs, and what they want. ‘Don’t touch my toys.’ They know how much they’ll share and what they’ll wear. ‘Not the red coat.’ They even hold strong opinions an adult might find peculiar and random. A toddler visiting a castle ruin might suddenly announce, ‘I hate this castle’, and you wonder why, because hate is a strong word, until you realise they’re probably just tired, or hungry, and a ruin offers precious little room to run around.
So much depends on what happens next. Caregivers who let children explore within safe limits help them trust their own will and needs. Caregivers who instead put their own needs first, shame the child, and offer love only on conditions teach the child to please. Authoritative parenting is warm and firm, without being psychologically controlling. Authoritarian parenting, by contrast, is low on warmth and high on control: ‘because I said so’ (Baumrind, 1971). It is intrusive: it invalidates feelings, withdraws love, guilt-trips, shames, and dictates what the child should feel or think. This is psychological control (Barber, 1996), and it violates a child’s boundaries at a very young and formative age, when the little person can’t even put up resistance and doesn’t yet understand that a boundary is being crossed. Some children come to believe, wrongly, that they are bad or naughty. They suppress their own boundaries to keep the love, and do as they’re told to keep the peace. Children of authoritarian parents can grow into over-compliant, self-restricted people-pleasers, or become authoritarian themselves. Others rebel, though rebellion is only occasionally healthy: it can just as easily lead to self-destructive behaviour, reckless living, addiction, and a pattern of poor choices made out of spite.
Sometimes it’s not even because the parents don’t mean well. Warmth and good intentions can co-exist with intrusive parenting. A micro-managing caregiver can be loving but still undermine a child’s self-efficacy and autonomy. The key to telling healthy parenting from controlling is calibration. Some control, when it comes to safety and well-being, is necessary: a child needs to eat and to be kept safe from running into the road, even if the toddler would rather just run around. But the give-away is excess. A micro-managing mother overrides a child’s autonomy by insisting they clean the plate, dress a certain way and choose certain things. Children raised by well-meaning but psychologically intrusive parents can learn that love and control are fused. Some later find themselves drawn to controlling partners, friends, or bosses, because what is familiar can feel like what is right.
There is also neglectful parenting (Maccoby & Martin, 1983), where children don’t learn healthy boundaries because no one sets any. The parents are low on warmth and low on demands and the children are left to themselves. Neglected children can grow up with trouble self-regulating, because we learn to manage our emotions by co-regulating with an attuned parent, and when the caregiver is absent or unsupportive, the child never gets that scaffolding. As adults, they might invade other people’s boundaries without quite realising it, or, just as often, develop pleasing behaviours to be accepted and loved. The same person can be demanding and hard to please with some people and overly accommodating, even docile, with others, their behaviour a yo-yo between closeness and distance.
As children grow, their capacity for empathy develops alongside their sense of self. They learn that saying a thing a certain way can wound, and that some opinions are best kept private. We are all alike in some ways and different in others, and that is fine; polarised as our society is, it still makes room for a plurality of views. This is where politeness comes from, and for most of us it is a good thing. But there is a catch. While most people happily follow the basic rules of politeness, others are glad to break them, because pushing at other people’s boundaries pays off, at least sometimes. And that is exactly how the goodwill of the nice and the polite gets exploited.
None of this splits neatly into good and bad. Most parents are doing their best, even when they fall short, and upbringing, powerful as it is, is almost never the whole story of how a child turns out, or how well they’ll hold their boundaries later. Genetics, temperament, education, peers, and good role models all shape it too. A child can have a warm, supportive upbringing and still be timid or introverted by nature, more afraid of upsetting others, and a little more cautious about asserting their needs.
But none of that is destiny. Whatever our upbringing and our temperament have made easy or hard, once we are adults we get some say in it: we can decide how much we are willing to let others overstep, and at what cost. And the surest way to build that is not to start with the hardest confrontation. It is to hold a small line in a low-stakes moment, when the risk is slight and little hangs on it. When in doubt, start small, practise, and take it from there, slowly and incrementally, day by day or week by week, until you finally feel good about how you let other people treat you.
References
- Barber, B. K. (1996). Parental psychological control: revisiting a neglected construct. Child development, 67(6), 3296–3319. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9071782/
- Baumrind, D. (1971). Current patterns of parental authority. Developmental Psychology, 4(1, Pt.2), 1–103. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0030372
- Maccoby, E. E., & Martin, J. A. (1983). Socialization in the context of the family: Parent–child interaction. In P. H. Mussen & E. M. Hetherington (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 4. Socialization, personality, and social development (pp. 1–101). Wiley.
- Mahler, M. S., Pine, F., & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the human infant: Symbiosis and individuation. Basic Books.