Breaking Rules

This summer while vacationing in Winter Park, my wife Tanya took Ella to a concert. The show finished at around 10 at night and they had to walk the quarter-mile walk back to the condo in the dark. Tanya decided to cut through someone’s yard, past a sign that warned against it.

“Mom, I’m confused,” Ella said. “At home I have to follow the rules but in Winter Park I don’t?”

After Tanya put Ella to bed and told me what our 9-year-old had said, I wondered: Are there times when it’s OK for parents to break the rules? If so, are we negatively impacting our children?

Like most parents, Tanya and I enforce certain behavioral requirements in our home. No physical violence, clean up your own mess and be kind to others. These guidelines form the basis for life skills like responsibility, healthy living and staying out of prison. But rules in general can be tricky: They’re hard to follow 100 percent of the time, hard to enforce and sometimes they don’t make much sense.

Tanya and Ella didn’t need to cut through the private yard, but Tanya was alone with her exhausted fourth-grader in complete darkness in an unfamiliar place and trusted her instincts. Breaking the rule wasn’t necessary; they got home safely, and no one’s property was destroyed. This one situation surely won’t affect Ella’s morality, even if they smudged the line between right and wrong.

Had they gotten caught in the act of trespassing, I suppose I might look at this situation differently. Maybe Ella would, in the future, be less likely to flaunt the lack of enforcement of some common societal rules, regardless of whether we OK it. I suspect Tanya would think twice, as well, but probably not to the same extent.

Some might say that a lifetime of rule breaking starts with one instance. And for some situations, like doing drugs or theft, I would agree. But we also need to be practical. While a parent’s main role is to set a positive example, that doesn’t always happen.

I’m generally an excellent rule follower, yet when I jaywalk or run into a store to use a bathroom clearly marked “Restroom for Customers Only” and don’t get caught, the lack of vigilant enforcement leads me to feel like I can do it again.

But I don’t.

That’s because a moral compass is both subjective and situational. The challenge for parents is to teach these principles while modeling them, yet somehow live our lives as the flawed beings we are. Maybe parents and children should get caught breaking rules together — to teach both parties a lesson.

Indeed, history has taught us that sometimes breaking rules can lead us forward. Galileo broke from tradition to support the solar system model we know today to be true. Rosa Parks knew that sitting in the front of the bus was her right, rules be damned. I would be proud if my child did something similar.