Establishing healthy boundaries sometimes requires you to make some hard decisions.

All of our kids have Life360 on their phones. If you don’t know what that is, it’s an app that lets you track where your children are at all times. My kids have referred to it as the parental stalking app. It’s great — it gives you little notifications when they arrive at home or at school or whatever. When they started driving, we added that to their phones.

Anyway, I think Abby Kate was a senior in high school when this happened. Sunny and I were headed out of town for a wedding one Friday afternoon and I got this notification on my phone that Abby Kate had left school. But the school day wasn’t over yet. It was her last period of the day and the teacher was sick or whatever and they weren’t doing anything that day and it was a Friday — so she just left school.

I thought to myself, “Well, she comes by it naturally, I guess.” It was this full circle moment for me.

Of course, she got busted and they were talking about some slap on the wrist discipline for her. So she was saying, “This is no big deal. We weren’t doing anything in class and it was the last period of the day.” She asked me if I could talk to the principal, just say that this was no big deal. And I said, “No, I can’t do that.”

She said, “Why not?”

I said, “Because I’m the one who called and turned you in for skipping class.”

She said, “You did what?”

I said, “Yeah, when I saw that you had left, I called the school and told them that you weren’t there.” When the receptionist answered the phone, I said, “Hi, there, this is Jason Bybee. I would like to report that my daughter has just left school. I would like for her to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

I said, “So, yeah, Abby Kate, I called and turned you in.”

She said, “Why would you do that?”

Because you reap what you sow. And sometimes the most loving thing to do is to let someone suffer the natural consequences of their actions.

Things were a little frosty with my teenage daughter there for a while. But it was the right decision because it reinforced a lesson about boundaries and consequences — a lesson we all have to learn.