In his teaching, the abbot should always observe the Apostle’s recommendation, in which he says: Use argument, appeal, reproof 2 Timothy 4:2. This means that he must vary with circumstances, threatening and coaxing by turns, stern as a taskmaster, devoted and tender as only a father can be. (RB 2.23-24)
The purpose of parental discipline is to train up children in good habits, directing them along right paths, understanding that in a few short years they will no longer be children and will have to direct themselves. But Christian discipline cannot be just a set of techniques to implement in order to produce desirable outcomes in one’s offspring. Christian discipline engages the heart, that is, the interior seat of the will, the emotions, the desires of the individual human being. You cannot engage the hearts of your children if you don’t put your own heart into the task.
For very young children, habit formation and language acquisition occur simultaneously. While negotiations may slow you down, you do actually want your children to learn how to argue on their own behalf. This involves them learning how to articulate their thoughts and feelings in a way that is both understandable and bearable to those around them, that is, without screaming or hitting, but with words. Parents cannot teach their children what they themselves do not practice. This is why we have to work at engaging the arguing child with a counter-argument even as we enforce necessary boundaries and behaviors. In order to engage the child rationally, you must recognize the reasons for the norms you’re enforcing. You must understand your own course of action well enough to be able to explain it at a level that the child can understand. Sometimes your motivations are beyond logic: articulate your emotions as well. Inevitably the day will come when, upon examination, you realize that your reasons are trivial, arbitrary or indefensible. The thing to do at that point is to concede, and change course. If you feel yourself losing your temper, verbalize that too with an advance warning. No one can read your child’s mind, and no one can read your mind either. This is why we have language.
There are parents who tolerate no divergence from their own opinions, decisions, and feelings. They don’t consider that they owe any defense or explanations for punishments that they inflict. The result is that the children are left to make their own deductions and draw their own conclusions, which they will not communicate back to the parents, because that’s not the sort of relationship that is formed in what is, in microcosm, a dictatorship. Such parents may obtain exactly the outcomes they are seeking, in terms of performance in the short term. But they are not developing in their children the capacity to make good decisions when no one is around to direct them. Parents who repress honest dissent also create the conditions for deceit to flourish. As in larger scale tyrannies, the only possible pathways are subservience, rebellion, or escape.
At the other end of the spectrum are the parents who abdicate both authority and responsibility. They defer decisions even on life-changing matters, even to young children. Some go further and cultivate transgressiveness as the norm that they enforce. They appeal to a child’s good nature without taking action to thwart bad habits. Then they reproach the child for bad behavior without imposing consequences. These parents may not believe in obedience on principle, but they are the ones who stand around complaining about how disappointing their teenagers have turned out to be, a dozen years later. Responsibility, compassion and morality are not automatic settings that flip on when a young person turns eighteen. Parents who neglect to enforce these qualities can only hope that someone else will.
Wise parents put thought and effort into examining their own behaviors in specific situations. They threaten sparingly, because at the end of the day when they’re tired they’d rather relax than inflict punishment—but they will follow through. They coax carefully, because their children are clever enough to turn bribes into blackmail when logic opens those opportunities. Wise parents are resolute as to principles but sympathetic as to feelings. Wise parents are smart enough to admit when they have made mistakes themselves. They teach the difference between ordinary rights and wrongs in real time, as they go along.
For example: stealing. If your very young daughter takes something from a store, you bring her back to the place where the object was, and you require her to put it back, which means relinquishing it. Before she took it, she had no concept of theft: now she does. You have taught her that the thing that is not hers must remain where it is, and that this principle is important enough to be worth a lot of extra effort on your part. For some children, this simple intervention is all they’ll ever need. Once she realizes it’s wrong, she may very well never do it again. Of course, another child may know it’s wrong and do it anyway. That child must not only return the object but must apologize to the owner for taking it. This humiliating experience is a powerful exercise in practical repentance. Not many children want to put themselves in such a position ever again. But if the behavior escalates, so must the punishment. If you have a very hard-headed, stubborn child, chances are that you are hard-headed and stubborn enough yourself to figure out how to communicate that honesty is important to you. But of course, honesty must be, in fact, important enough to you for you to take the trouble.
This said, wise parents also realize that sometimes children misbehave for circumstantial reasons. The challenge is to observe accurately and deduce honestly what those contributing factors may be. You should feed the hungry child and put the exhausted child to bed. You should administer appropriate treatment to injuries both physical and emotional. Complicated teenage tangles will require many hours of patient conversation. A mistake calls for the benefit of the doubt. Extenuating circumstances call for consideration. Certainly the child who is obedient, docile and patient deserves the gentlest of appeals. Sometimes a well-meaning child may be making the effort to comply with expectations but simply cannot perform as you wish.
Realize that you too experience all sorts of variables that affect your behavior. Maybe you need to let go of something else in your life that is sapping your energy or taking your time, in order to have the time and energy to engage with your children constructively. Don’t be the father who didn’t bother. Don’t be the mother who was never there. Each of your children needs some time with you. When you slow down and make the effort to come alongside to help the struggling one, to look at the problem from the child’s vantage point, usually you do find that you have the understanding to assess, at least, what the problem is. If you don’t, seek help. The Christian premise is that we are part of the Body of Christ. We’re not supposed to be independent of everyone else.
At the end of the day, having done your utmost and still feeling, perhaps, like a failure, the most difficult challenge can be to yield your child to God. In fact we do not have complete control over our lives, nor over the lives of our children, and the older they get, the less control we have. Renunciation is one of the most difficult spiritual disciplines to practice, but it is the very essence of the life of faith.
