We all come into the world as egoists; it is our job to get over it. It is our parent's job to help us, and it is our responsibility before God to assist our children in every way possible in this most difficult and most important of tasks; C. S. Lewis portrayed the ego as multiple layers of thick, tough, knobbly, scaly skin which obscure our true personality, but we identify it as our personality. Shedding this skin is the most painful thing possible, for it feels to us like the death of our person, of everything which goes to make us a personal being.
I generally say that the way to discover the truth of any issue is to find out in detail what the modern world teaches, and then contradict it point by point, and this is especially true when it comes to the subject of child rearing, for the World indeed has told nothing but lies to us on that subject; that is, it has told lies to those of us who intend to raise our children as Christians. It has told the truth about how to raise a certain kind of child; if you want to raise an egotistical pagan, a self-satisfied narcissist, destructively self centered and self nurturing, being at the same time utterly dependent on the forms the contemporary world has invented to contain these impotent egos, then you can follow no better course than the one the world has laid out for you. If you follow the advice the world has given you for producing the kind of children it wants, and foolishly take it as a sound program for producing the kind of children you want, whose fault is that? We seem to have this very strange idea that we can take advice from those whose motives and ideals are utterly alien to us, and productively fit it into our Christian worldview without seriously distorting our Christian universe, but of course this is not possible.
What kind of child should we, as Christians, wish to produce? Of course, we want a child that will be submissive to God in everything, unhesitatingly laying down his own will before the Divine Will; but how does one go about raising a child like that? In a word, Obedience; Obedience, we are told, is the key to all the other virtues. When we practice obedience, we act as if we are a part of something larger and more important than ourselves; when we are disobedient, we proclaim in a language everyone understands that we are the largest thing in our Universe.
Our time is unique in that many (if not most) children fail to follow the values of their parents. This represents a failure of parenting on a vast scale. The State practices effective parenting in its self-appointed role of One True Parent, (to which the child's natural parents are subservient). As the State does not wish for the caretaker/parents to erect effective obstacles to its efforts to form the minds and wills of the children, Parents are in many ways obstructed, and even forbidden from practicing effective parenting.
Many parents wish to instill obedience in their children, but few in our day are successful. Why is this? Perhaps partly it is because we have confused obedience with getting our kids to do what we want them to. Children who obey grudgingly and only after much haranguing, and who go back to doing whatever it was they were doing the moment your back is turned are not being instilled with a spirit of obedience; children who have to be bribed constantly, in many and sundry ways, are not being taught obedience, but are being turned into little mercenaries. We need to teach our Children the value of Obedience, so that they can be inspired to acquire that virtue; once, when my daughter was being over-argumentative I simply turned to her and asked, "Do you intend to obey, or not?" (I wouldn't recommend this for those whose children have been raised without effective restraint). Because she really did, deep down in her heart, (really deep!) wish to be obedient, that was enough (for the moment).
Our children also live in a social environment which preaches relentlessly to them the supreme value of the unfettered will, and there is no way to shield them from this totally; there are however, things we can do, and they all need to be done in conjunction, or we have done nothing. It's like trying to contain water in a bowl with holes in it; if you plug only one hole, the water will just leak out of the others. So if you choose to homeschool, and yet watch T.V., you have essentially done nothing; if you use your television only for watching movies you must be very careful if you are to avoid exposing your children to the full panoply of modern social propaganda. Almost all contemporary children's movies have very explicit pedagogic messages woven intricately into the story; unfortunately, most parents are primed to pass a movie for consumption as long as it doesn't have too much gratuitous bloodshed or explicit sexuality, and if the language isn't too bad. These aren't even the first things I look at as a parent; the most important thing is, what's the moral? I have known parents to reject a movie that actually had a rather wholesome treatment of human relationships because it showed a little "skin", while accepting a movie for the consumption of their teenagers that portrayed a very perverse view of sexuality because it didn't. You also have to be careful of your child's friends (a common piece of parenting advice in the past that has gone way out of vogue) or they will get all the influences of public school and television through the mouths of their playmates.
The most important reason parents aren't successful in forming their children is that we deny ourselves the necessary tools, or so circumscribe their use, and use them so inconsistently, that they are ineffective for any long-term purpose. I am speaking here primarily of the much-despised "corporal punishment" (I used to tell people that in my view, parents should use capital punishment only in extreme situations). In our day, spanking is looked on as extremely barbaric, (I have even been told that I was evil for advocating it). What is it, in our time, that produces this extreme aversion to what, after all, is only one of the constant realities of human existence? Until recently, corporal punishment was commonly used on adults for many offences against the law. As Christians, we accept many aspects of the temporal world as Divine chastisement of sin; we are sentenced to death and a vast assortment of painful circumstances by a just God whom we also confess to be merciful.
I believe the root of our contemporary aversion to these harsh realities does lie in the progress of western culture, which in many ways can be seen as the rebellion of the rich and comfortable against the idea that the pains of mortal life are dictated by God for our improvement. Obviously, it is going to be more comfortable for those who have made themselves comfortable to believe the pains of life are more or less accidental, and that the purpose of human society is to alleviate as many of these discomforts as possible. This necessitates removing God from the picture as One who is in control of all aspects of our life, either by eliminating him entirely, or removing Him a great distance from mundane affairs by positing Him as a "Grand Architect" who, after drawing out the plans left their completion to lesser, fallible hands. Much of the modern hostility against God is because of the pain in the world.
How can we recognize God's righteous chastisement of our misdeeds, and not recognize that it is right to punish children when they misbehave; are we more righteous than God? Obviously, we are less competent; it is nevertheless our responsibility to form the character of our Children in the pattern of godliness. We also know that if they do not learn responsibility that they will suffer many things in their encounters with the world, that if they grow up selfish there will be pain in all their social encounters, that if they do not acquire self-discipline they will be thwarted in all their endeavors by their own weakness of will.
Knowing all this, what is it that prevents parents from training their children to act responsibly? We love our children, and it is hard for us to punish them; we worry that if we strictly impose punishments we will loose the love of our children. This is not true, by the way; it is typically the indulged child that despises his parents. This is necessarily so; the indulged child is one thoroughly in thrall to his ego. For such a child, the parent is only a hateful object that stands in the way of the fulfillment of his wishes; the properly disciplined child loves his parents. There were some boys at one of the churches I once attended who tended to make things a little "lively" at times. Their father's entire notion of parental discipline was to sit them down and have a heart-to-heart chat with them. The kids would sit there, faces aglow with adoration, saying, "O.K. daddy; we love you, daddy". My daughter would then tell me the kinds of things they said about him when his back was turned; "Stupid old man; we sure pulled one over on him". It is a very bad thing to let your children grow up thinking you're dumber than they are.
Despite our love for our children, it is our responsibility to make sure they are able to win the battle over the ego, and we do this by chastising the serpent whenever it shows itself; it is our love for our children that should powerfully motivate us to do so. The problem is that parents have very tender feelings for their children; these feelings are commonly confused with love. It is not our job to indulge our parental feelings, but to love our children with strong, active love that stands beside our children to help them fight their battles, the kind of love God has for us; not weak, trumpery love that will not act to gain any benefit, but is only a languid feeding on the sweetness of our own feelings. God judged Eli because he did not bring up his sons in righteousness, and would not act to restrain their wickedness; there are many contemporary Eli's. Our time looks upon itself as being possessed of a very special tenderness of heart, but what it has is only a very pronounced weakness of stomach, an inability to deal effectively with any of the harsh realities of life. The refusal to discipline is one aspect of the modern rebellion against authority, and against God, the source of all good authority. We cannot fully recognize God's just authority over us unless we first recognize the principle of godly authority and its operation in bringing order to the world.
Modern children are essentially over entertained, over socialized, and way too divorced from the context of adult life, and the reality of Family as a working community. Because they are over entertained, they cannot take an interest in what is going on around them, hence the ubiquitous childish boredom whenever they are not involved in some sort of game, and resentment whenever life itself is not made into a game for them. I know kids who are unable to take an interest in anything that isn't a video game. My daughter had time to play, but the only entertainments available to her on a regular basis were books and piano; consequently, she was interested in books and piano. I made sure not to have too much "children's" literature around (that staple of Public Schooling's anti-literacy campaign). She was able to take an interest in what was going on in the family because her consciousness was not deluged by fabricated entertainments (the sugars of the intellectual diet); I largely attribute to this the fact that she was able, at the age of sixteen, to seriously desire to enter the rigors of the monastic calling.
That children are over-socialized is sufficiently demonstrated by the kids you see with cell-phones, who feel they must constantly inform their friends of what they're doing; "Hi, I'm at the Mall; now I'm going to get lunch; now I'm waiting at the crosswalk; now I'm crossing the street.....". Peer Pressure is social addiction, and the consequent inability of over-socialized children to resist any movement of their peers. This kind of socialization is what Public Schooling was invented to produce (It didn't really have anything to do with education). It used to be that socialization took place mainly in family groups; that is, families gathering together for some social function or another. Of course people tended to roughly congregate in age-groups, but the point is, socialization was done in the context of the Family, and consequently people had social contact with people of all different ages. When Public Schooling imposed its grid on the development of children universally, you immediately begin to see a very different kind of socialization emerging; sausage-link socialization, in which each age group socializes primarily with those of the same age, and has little social contact with any other age-group. This is the environment the social engineers of the early 20th century desired to produce, an environment in which the opinions of one's peers are not only an important factor, but almost the only factor. Each link thus segregated from the others provides a tasty meal for propagandists, who are then free to devise social experiments on each age-group independently, without interference from those who have enough life-experience to be somewhat resistant to manipulation. My daughter was raised apart from this model of socialization by intent; it was really my most important reason for homeschooling. This made her kind of an odd duck; she really didn't fit into the groups where the kids were locked together in a social embrace after the public school pattern. I don't really think she missed much. She developed into a young woman who liked very well to be with children her age, but wasn't dependent on it. I think the kids who were involved in that type of socialization were much sillier and much less emotionally mature, and (incidentally) much less truly self-reliant.
Children aren't meant to live in a Never-land world made especially for them, but to fit into the context of adult life, and learn to function in that context. The Family is the most basic unit of social order, and as such it is a living, working community in which each of the inhabitants needs to have a productive place, not a dormitory for detached individuals on the way to their various destinations; consequently, the children need to be managed in such a way that it doesn't make the smooth and efficient accomplishment of daily tasks impossible. Many, if not most, families are entirely dominated by the children, and so any productive purpose is entirely suspended, as the daily activity becomes to keep the children barely within the most minimal bonds of civility. Adult life should not come to an end whenever the children are present, therefore children have to be made to behave in such a way as to make Adult concourse possible in their presence; the old rule "Children should be seen and not heard" was a real necessity back in the day when most everyone had eight children. Can anyone even remotely imagine what a gathering of families would have been like back then under today's conditions? The mind reels!
Children are a mirror, reflecting the whole range of human passions with the utmost clarity. In them we may most plainly see what the human creature is, with selfishness, greed, lust, and cruelty alternating with the innocent expression of love, trust, pity, and what can only be described as a primordial hunger for the Kingdom of Heaven; like clouds covering the face of the sun and passing on, so are the alterations of childish moods. They have not yet learned the arts of subterfuge and self-deception at which adults become so adept.
Children need solidity in their environment, and they will run tests to make sure it is solid. They push the boundaries not because their deepest wish is for there to be no boundaries, but to establish that the boundaries are firm; they know adults say many things they don't really mean. When an adult means something strongly enough to make a child comply with it, this establishes the importance of that thing in the child's mind, or at least how important the adults in his life really think this is, despite what they say; think of the difference in the reaction of parents when their child runs out into the street versus their reaction when the child, for instance, doesn't want to go to church, or say prayers. In the former instance, the parents are likely to be angry, and they will make sure the child does not run out into the street; in the latter, there may be a manifestation of some concern, but it's not as likely to be treated as a big deal. Children, who intensely study adult reactions as clues to the nature of reality, read: "Physical dangers are real, but spiritual dangers are illusory"; Indeed, this is what the parents have communicated, and possibly what they, in their heart of hearts, unreflectively believe.
The forlornness of a child who has his own way in everything can sometimes be observed; everything he has set his will against has proven unsubstantial, and he is left standing in the nothingness of his own will; children engage in intensive battle to establish the supremacy of their will, and are intensely unhappy when it is established. A child doesn't have the capacity to order his own universe, so when outside order evaporates, he is left to the chaos of his own impulses. They are little lawyers who relentlessly examine and press each article of the parental command, compulsive gamblers who will risk all over the possibility that maybe this time he will get away with it. This is why persistence and consistency in discipline is so necessary; if you punish nine times for a particular offense and the tenth time let it go, the memory of the one time he got away with it is enough to push him over the edge. Children also develop internal and symbolical resistances to authority; when I was little and got my hand slapped for something, my mother noticed that for some time afterward I would pick at the place that had been slapped, and fling my arm in the air. When she asked me what I was doing, I said, "I'm taking it off, and throwing it away". I just barely remember the incident, and believe that was my private way of internally rejecting the reprimand; my parent could slap my hand, but I was not going to accept it. Of course, if you just settle for superficial compliance you're treating the symptom, not the disease; in order to effectively parent, you have to be inside the mind and soul of your child.
It is important to start early; expectations are established at a very early age, and have to be painfully refuted once rooted. I know someone who had a child with a very loud cry; this baby was treated differently from their other children. As soon as the child started to cry, it got what it wanted, just to stop the noise; of course, the child developed with the expectation that when he said "jump" everyone else was to say only "how high?". The parents have been battling that one out for the last several years.
Saying "They're only children" is the blanket excuse for any kind of misbehavior; as if you can't be held responsible for the behavior of your children as long as you persistently remind everyone that they are children (as if we thought they were Senior Citizens). Now, it is true that we need to remember that children have small attention spans, and have to be reminded of things, but they should be expected to behave in a civilized manner. Drawing mustaches on the Icon prints on the church bulletin-board is not something that should be excused by their being children; they should know what inappropriate behavior is. If they don't know, they should be taught. Many children don't appear to think it necessary to listen when they are being spoken to, and the magic words "I forgot" make everything O.K. . I can tell you, when a child is held responsible for hearing and remembering what you said, both hearing and memory improve by about 150%.
We should be aiming to produce children who behave well; the highest ambition of many parents appears to be to produce children that only a mother could love, and who regularly press her to the limits. If we were truly concerned about self-esteem, we would discipline our children; a child whose behavior is so bad that it is a penance to be around him is going to feel this disapproval, whether it is articulated or not, and this will influence his self-esteem. A child who learns to discharge tasks swiftly and competently will have better self-esteem; this may seem like a mystical statement to those whose minds dwell in the dense mists of modern psychology, but self-esteem, if it has any substance to it at all, and is not just a kind of gas with which we regularly have to pump up the psyche, depends upon really being esteemed, and those who are esteemed are those who comport themselves in a way that is esteemable.
Children have to be trained to focus before they will be able to regularly and competently carry out any task; a child that is not required to focus his attention on the task-at-hand, won't. It is much easier to let your thoughts tumble around in LaLa Land, if you know that you are not going to be held responsible for the hash that results because you're not paying attention. The only way to focus a child's attention that I know of is to have some kind of awful penalty, and of all penalties, the one which seems to hold the attention most is the afore-mentioned corporal punishment. This, of course, makes sense; we are conditioned to be influenced by pain. Pain is designed by our beneficent Creator to be the teacher-of-last-resort; when we feel pain, it tells us, "this is bad; I'd better stop doing this". It sets up internal resistances and inhibitions which are a great aid in later life in resisting various seductions, and in attaining the degree of self-compulsion which is so necessary in becoming a responsible person; there are, of course, other ways to learn, but none so deeply emblazons itself on the memory, as indicated in the adage, "The burned hand teaches best". The only way other forms of learning can be effective is if some amount of self-discipline has already been acquired. Pain also educates on a deep level; it is relatively easy to get a person to adapt their superficial behaviors, but painfully difficult to educate on a moral level. This, of course, is where it is determined what kind of person the child is to be. If a parent does not carry the battle into this arena, they effectually cede influence in the child's moral development to outside influences, i.e., the World.
Though Parents expend their best efforts, it is still necessary for the child to choose. It takes a great effort of the will to overcome lessons reinforced with painful consequences, though. This makes it a moral thing, for the will is involved on a conscious level in choosing right and wrong, not just overridden by the strength of passions which have never received an effective check. It is necessary for those for whom the wrong lessons have been enforced to choose against their upbringing, and of course a child may choose to reject a good upbringing despite all compulsion; but it should be made easy for children to choose the right, and difficult to choose the wrong. The undisciplined child is hag-ridden by his own will, and will choose his own way even if he dimly perceives he is leaving happiness behind in so doing. Choosing one's own way is the direct road away from God; it is the path Adam and Eve chose in the Garden which led them out of Eden, and it has been leading the Human race through an infinite diversity of sordid hells ever since.
One weapon the Psychobabblers use to great effect against the Modern Parent is the idea that, if they do not utilize great care, they will irreparably damage their children by inflicting them with low self-esteem. Once a child recognizes his parent's concern in this area, he will play this card over and over again to avoid punishment, and can even leverage it into a series of rewards for bad behavior designed to bolster his self-esteem; life is good for a child whose parents read Pop Psych literature. What low self-esteem is, of course, is wounded pride; it used to be called "the sulks". The path to esteem is for one who does not succeed to try harder, and if success still doesn't come, to recognize that you are one of few and poor abilities, but as a child of God your life's fulfillment comes in using your talents, such as they are, in His service, without finding it necessary to determine the exact order of magnitude of your abilities in the galaxy of God's Kingdom. Children used to have to function as members of human communities, and became able to discharge adult responsibilities at a young age; this is true self-esteem, being a valuable component of human society, using your abilities for the love of others, and being loved by them in return.
The most important reason parents aren't successful in forming their children is that we deny ourselves the necessary tools, or so circumscribe their use, and use them so inconsistently, that they are ineffective for any long-term purpose. I am speaking here primarily of the much-despised "corporal punishment" (I used to tell people that in my view, parents should use capital punishment only in extreme situations). In our day, spanking is looked on as extremely barbaric, (I have even been told that I was evil for advocating it). What is it, in our time, that produces this extreme aversion to what, after all, is only one of the constant realities of human existence? Until recently, corporal punishment was commonly used on adults for many offences against the law. As Christians, we accept many aspects of the temporal world as Divine chastisement of sin; we are sentenced to death and a vast assortment of painful circumstances by a just God whom we also confess to be merciful.
I believe the root of our contemporary aversion to these harsh realities does lie in the progress of western culture, which in many ways can be seen as the rebellion of the rich and comfortable against the idea that the pains of mortal life are dictated by God for our improvement. Obviously, it is going to be more comfortable for those who have made themselves comfortable to believe the pains of life are more or less accidental, and that the purpose of human society is to alleviate as many of these discomforts as possible. This necessitates removing God from the picture as One who is in control of all aspects of our life, either by eliminating him entirely, or removing Him a great distance from mundane affairs by positing Him as a "Grand Architect" who, after drawing out the plans left their completion to lesser, fallible hands. Much of the modern hostility against God is because of the pain in the world.
How can we recognize God's righteous chastisement of our misdeeds, and not recognize that it is right to punish children when they misbehave; are we more righteous than God? Obviously, we are less competent; it is nevertheless our responsibility to form the character of our Children in the pattern of godliness. We also know that if they do not learn responsibility that they will suffer many things in their encounters with the world, that if they grow up selfish there will be pain in all their social encounters, that if they do not acquire self-discipline they will be thwarted in all their endeavors by their own weakness of will.
Knowing all this, what is it that prevents parents from training their children to act responsibly? We love our children, and it is hard for us to punish them; we worry that if we strictly impose punishments we will loose the love of our children. This is not true, by the way; it is typically the indulged child that despises his parents. This is necessarily so; the indulged child is one thoroughly in thrall to his ego. For such a child, the parent is only a hateful object that stands in the way of the fulfillment of his wishes; the properly disciplined child loves his parents. There were some boys at one of the churches I once attended who tended to make things a little "lively" at times. Their father's entire notion of parental discipline was to sit them down and have a heart-to-heart chat with them. The kids would sit there, faces aglow with adoration, saying, "O.K. daddy; we love you, daddy". My daughter would then tell me the kinds of things they said about him when his back was turned; "Stupid old man; we sure pulled one over on him". It is a very bad thing to let your children grow up thinking you're dumber than they are.
Despite our love for our children, it is our responsibility to make sure they are able to win the battle over the ego, and we do this by chastising the serpent whenever it shows itself; it is our love for our children that should powerfully motivate us to do so. The problem is that parents have very tender feelings for their children; these feelings are commonly confused with love. It is not our job to indulge our parental feelings, but to love our children with strong, active love that stands beside our children to help them fight their battles, the kind of love God has for us; not weak, trumpery love that will not act to gain any benefit, but is only a languid feeding on the sweetness of our own feelings. God judged Eli because he did not bring up his sons in righteousness, and would not act to restrain their wickedness; there are many contemporary Eli's. Our time looks upon itself as being possessed of a very special tenderness of heart, but what it has is only a very pronounced weakness of stomach, an inability to deal effectively with any of the harsh realities of life. The refusal to discipline is one aspect of the modern rebellion against authority, and against God, the source of all good authority. We cannot fully recognize God's just authority over us unless we first recognize the principle of godly authority and its operation in bringing order to the world.
Modern children are essentially over entertained, over socialized, and way too divorced from the context of adult life, and the reality of Family as a working community. Because they are over entertained, they cannot take an interest in what is going on around them, hence the ubiquitous childish boredom whenever they are not involved in some sort of game, and resentment whenever life itself is not made into a game for them. I know kids who are unable to take an interest in anything that isn't a video game. My daughter had time to play, but the only entertainments available to her on a regular basis were books and piano; consequently, she was interested in books and piano. I made sure not to have too much "children's" literature around (that staple of Public Schooling's anti-literacy campaign). She was able to take an interest in what was going on in the family because her consciousness was not deluged by fabricated entertainments (the sugars of the intellectual diet); I largely attribute to this the fact that she was able, at the age of sixteen, to seriously desire to enter the rigors of the monastic calling.
That children are over-socialized is sufficiently demonstrated by the kids you see with cell-phones, who feel they must constantly inform their friends of what they're doing; "Hi, I'm at the Mall; now I'm going to get lunch; now I'm waiting at the crosswalk; now I'm crossing the street.....". Peer Pressure is social addiction, and the consequent inability of over-socialized children to resist any movement of their peers. This kind of socialization is what Public Schooling was invented to produce (It didn't really have anything to do with education). It used to be that socialization took place mainly in family groups; that is, families gathering together for some social function or another. Of course people tended to roughly congregate in age-groups, but the point is, socialization was done in the context of the Family, and consequently people had social contact with people of all different ages. When Public Schooling imposed its grid on the development of children universally, you immediately begin to see a very different kind of socialization emerging; sausage-link socialization, in which each age group socializes primarily with those of the same age, and has little social contact with any other age-group. This is the environment the social engineers of the early 20th century desired to produce, an environment in which the opinions of one's peers are not only an important factor, but almost the only factor. Each link thus segregated from the others provides a tasty meal for propagandists, who are then free to devise social experiments on each age-group independently, without interference from those who have enough life-experience to be somewhat resistant to manipulation. My daughter was raised apart from this model of socialization by intent; it was really my most important reason for homeschooling. This made her kind of an odd duck; she really didn't fit into the groups where the kids were locked together in a social embrace after the public school pattern. I don't really think she missed much. She developed into a young woman who liked very well to be with children her age, but wasn't dependent on it. I think the kids who were involved in that type of socialization were much sillier and much less emotionally mature, and (incidentally) much less truly self-reliant.
Children aren't meant to live in a Never-land world made especially for them, but to fit into the context of adult life, and learn to function in that context. The Family is the most basic unit of social order, and as such it is a living, working community in which each of the inhabitants needs to have a productive place, not a dormitory for detached individuals on the way to their various destinations; consequently, the children need to be managed in such a way that it doesn't make the smooth and efficient accomplishment of daily tasks impossible. Many, if not most, families are entirely dominated by the children, and so any productive purpose is entirely suspended, as the daily activity becomes to keep the children barely within the most minimal bonds of civility. Adult life should not come to an end whenever the children are present, therefore children have to be made to behave in such a way as to make Adult concourse possible in their presence; the old rule "Children should be seen and not heard" was a real necessity back in the day when most everyone had eight children. Can anyone even remotely imagine what a gathering of families would have been like back then under today's conditions? The mind reels!
Children are a mirror, reflecting the whole range of human passions with the utmost clarity. In them we may most plainly see what the human creature is, with selfishness, greed, lust, and cruelty alternating with the innocent expression of love, trust, pity, and what can only be described as a primordial hunger for the Kingdom of Heaven; like clouds covering the face of the sun and passing on, so are the alterations of childish moods. They have not yet learned the arts of subterfuge and self-deception at which adults become so adept.
Children need solidity in their environment, and they will run tests to make sure it is solid. They push the boundaries not because their deepest wish is for there to be no boundaries, but to establish that the boundaries are firm; they know adults say many things they don't really mean. When an adult means something strongly enough to make a child comply with it, this establishes the importance of that thing in the child's mind, or at least how important the adults in his life really think this is, despite what they say; think of the difference in the reaction of parents when their child runs out into the street versus their reaction when the child, for instance, doesn't want to go to church, or say prayers. In the former instance, the parents are likely to be angry, and they will make sure the child does not run out into the street; in the latter, there may be a manifestation of some concern, but it's not as likely to be treated as a big deal. Children, who intensely study adult reactions as clues to the nature of reality, read: "Physical dangers are real, but spiritual dangers are illusory"; Indeed, this is what the parents have communicated, and possibly what they, in their heart of hearts, unreflectively believe.
The forlornness of a child who has his own way in everything can sometimes be observed; everything he has set his will against has proven unsubstantial, and he is left standing in the nothingness of his own will; children engage in intensive battle to establish the supremacy of their will, and are intensely unhappy when it is established. A child doesn't have the capacity to order his own universe, so when outside order evaporates, he is left to the chaos of his own impulses. They are little lawyers who relentlessly examine and press each article of the parental command, compulsive gamblers who will risk all over the possibility that maybe this time he will get away with it. This is why persistence and consistency in discipline is so necessary; if you punish nine times for a particular offense and the tenth time let it go, the memory of the one time he got away with it is enough to push him over the edge. Children also develop internal and symbolical resistances to authority; when I was little and got my hand slapped for something, my mother noticed that for some time afterward I would pick at the place that had been slapped, and fling my arm in the air. When she asked me what I was doing, I said, "I'm taking it off, and throwing it away". I just barely remember the incident, and believe that was my private way of internally rejecting the reprimand; my parent could slap my hand, but I was not going to accept it. Of course, if you just settle for superficial compliance you're treating the symptom, not the disease; in order to effectively parent, you have to be inside the mind and soul of your child.
It is important to start early; expectations are established at a very early age, and have to be painfully refuted once rooted. I know someone who had a child with a very loud cry; this baby was treated differently from their other children. As soon as the child started to cry, it got what it wanted, just to stop the noise; of course, the child developed with the expectation that when he said "jump" everyone else was to say only "how high?". The parents have been battling that one out for the last several years.
Saying "They're only children" is the blanket excuse for any kind of misbehavior; as if you can't be held responsible for the behavior of your children as long as you persistently remind everyone that they are children (as if we thought they were Senior Citizens). Now, it is true that we need to remember that children have small attention spans, and have to be reminded of things, but they should be expected to behave in a civilized manner. Drawing mustaches on the Icon prints on the church bulletin-board is not something that should be excused by their being children; they should know what inappropriate behavior is. If they don't know, they should be taught. Many children don't appear to think it necessary to listen when they are being spoken to, and the magic words "I forgot" make everything O.K. . I can tell you, when a child is held responsible for hearing and remembering what you said, both hearing and memory improve by about 150%.
We should be aiming to produce children who behave well; the highest ambition of many parents appears to be to produce children that only a mother could love, and who regularly press her to the limits. If we were truly concerned about self-esteem, we would discipline our children; a child whose behavior is so bad that it is a penance to be around him is going to feel this disapproval, whether it is articulated or not, and this will influence his self-esteem. A child who learns to discharge tasks swiftly and competently will have better self-esteem; this may seem like a mystical statement to those whose minds dwell in the dense mists of modern psychology, but self-esteem, if it has any substance to it at all, and is not just a kind of gas with which we regularly have to pump up the psyche, depends upon really being esteemed, and those who are esteemed are those who comport themselves in a way that is esteemable.
Children have to be trained to focus before they will be able to regularly and competently carry out any task; a child that is not required to focus his attention on the task-at-hand, won't. It is much easier to let your thoughts tumble around in LaLa Land, if you know that you are not going to be held responsible for the hash that results because you're not paying attention. The only way to focus a child's attention that I know of is to have some kind of awful penalty, and of all penalties, the one which seems to hold the attention most is the afore-mentioned corporal punishment. This, of course, makes sense; we are conditioned to be influenced by pain. Pain is designed by our beneficent Creator to be the teacher-of-last-resort; when we feel pain, it tells us, "this is bad; I'd better stop doing this". It sets up internal resistances and inhibitions which are a great aid in later life in resisting various seductions, and in attaining the degree of self-compulsion which is so necessary in becoming a responsible person; there are, of course, other ways to learn, but none so deeply emblazons itself on the memory, as indicated in the adage, "The burned hand teaches best". The only way other forms of learning can be effective is if some amount of self-discipline has already been acquired. Pain also educates on a deep level; it is relatively easy to get a person to adapt their superficial behaviors, but painfully difficult to educate on a moral level. This, of course, is where it is determined what kind of person the child is to be. If a parent does not carry the battle into this arena, they effectually cede influence in the child's moral development to outside influences, i.e., the World.
Though Parents expend their best efforts, it is still necessary for the child to choose. It takes a great effort of the will to overcome lessons reinforced with painful consequences, though. This makes it a moral thing, for the will is involved on a conscious level in choosing right and wrong, not just overridden by the strength of passions which have never received an effective check. It is necessary for those for whom the wrong lessons have been enforced to choose against their upbringing, and of course a child may choose to reject a good upbringing despite all compulsion; but it should be made easy for children to choose the right, and difficult to choose the wrong. The undisciplined child is hag-ridden by his own will, and will choose his own way even if he dimly perceives he is leaving happiness behind in so doing. Choosing one's own way is the direct road away from God; it is the path Adam and Eve chose in the Garden which led them out of Eden, and it has been leading the Human race through an infinite diversity of sordid hells ever since.
One weapon the Psychobabblers use to great effect against the Modern Parent is the idea that, if they do not utilize great care, they will irreparably damage their children by inflicting them with low self-esteem. Once a child recognizes his parent's concern in this area, he will play this card over and over again to avoid punishment, and can even leverage it into a series of rewards for bad behavior designed to bolster his self-esteem; life is good for a child whose parents read Pop Psych literature. What low self-esteem is, of course, is wounded pride; it used to be called "the sulks". The path to esteem is for one who does not succeed to try harder, and if success still doesn't come, to recognize that you are one of few and poor abilities, but as a child of God your life's fulfillment comes in using your talents, such as they are, in His service, without finding it necessary to determine the exact order of magnitude of your abilities in the galaxy of God's Kingdom. Children used to have to function as members of human communities, and became able to discharge adult responsibilities at a young age; this is true self-esteem, being a valuable component of human society, using your abilities for the love of others, and being loved by them in return.
