Gentle & Firm
Gentle & Firm
Cruelty is lack of temperance in discipline. Permissiveness is neglect in discipline. Disciplining our daughters is not optional, but we need to do it for the right reasons and in the right ways.
The Purpose
In disciplining our daughters we are trying to:
Prevent them from sinning – St. Alphonsus Liguori teaches us that we are personally responsible for any sin that our children commit. Whether we taught them to do it by example or allowed them to do it by being negligent in our discipline, if they are doing what is evil, we share in their guilt. We also sin if we lead them to disobedience by unreasonable, confusing commands, or commands that they are not capable of fulfilling.
Prepare them to obey God – How difficult is it to obey God if we aren’t even able to obey simple commands from our superior? We need to learn the value of obedience and we need to practice, practice more, and keep practicing obedience until it becomes natural.
We tend to like the fact that our daughters are supposed to obey us. It’s important to remember; however, that they don’t owe us obedience, but rather they owe it to God to obey us. We forget that the purpose of their obedience to us is so that they may glorify God by their lives not for our benefit or convenience.
Let us teach our daughters to obey us for the sake of obedience to God, so that they may learn that clearly non sinful commands from their superiors (be it their parents, confessor, husband, or government) are sign posts for which way it is God’s Will for them to go. That is, if the Bishop wants us to stop working on a project, it means God wants us to stop working on it, and if our husband is asking us to focus on getting better at a particular skill, God wants us to get better at this particular skill.
Obedience
A command cannot be considered as having been obeyed if it is:
Ignored
Delayed
Done poorly intentionally
A command need not be obeyed if it is:
Given to them by someone who is not in authority
Clearly sinful (A good litmus test for this is if three random priests would all agree.)
Impossible
We may respond to a command by:
Respectfully asking questions
Respectfully raising concerns
Respectfully making suggestions
A good way to do this is by saying, “I intend to obey your command, but may I ask a question/share a concern.” It may seem long-winded and inefficient to say all that explicitly, but we should all be making it very clear what is going on. The alternative is mistaking prudence for insubordination or vice versa.
Consequences
Lack of obedience requires consequences for the purpose of correction, training, and improvement; not for the purpose of punishment and retaliation.
There are three reasons for negative consequences:
Unacceptable behavior
Breaking rules
Disobedience of a direct command
There are two kinds of negative consequences:
Immediate
Future loss of privileges
Steps for immediate consequences:
As a direct response to a failure of obedience, the first consequence is a mild reproof. That is, a reminder of the rule, an emphasis on the fact that the request is a command, or a statement about the unacceptability of the behavior. In practice, during this step we usually need to redirect their attention from what is keeping them from obeying. A simple way to do this is to have them repeat the rule, command, or the fact that the behavior is unacceptable. For example “I’m not allowed to delay.” “If you ask me to stop, I need to stop.” or “Throwing food is not allowed.”
If they don’t obey, then they need to be physically, but always gently, removed from being able to do what they shouldn’t be.
If it is a dangerous action, this needs to be the first step, then the first one gets skipped.
If they are engaging in a behavior (like yelling) where we can’t physically gently stop them from doing it, we go to the next step.
If we are asking them to do something, we don’t force them to do it but rather move on to a future loss of privilege.
When prevented, they should be taught to say “ok,” but it some cases they will “scream and cry” instead. At this point, we hold them in place and tell them to breathe and pray repeatedly until they calm down. A way to do this gently is by hugging their torso and arms together from behind. They may hurt our chin with their head trying to escape, but it’s not going to be physically harmful to them unless we use excessive force. This position is also helpful because we can do deep breaths ourselves, calm ourselves down, and encourage them to do so as well.
Once they are calm, we can go through the steps verbally with them reminding them what happened, what they did, and what they should have done instead.
If we weren’t gentle with them at any stage, we say sorry to them now.
If they got to the point of “screaming and crying,” at this point we inform them if we are choosing to enforce a future loss of privilege.
We end by praying with them for the strength and grace to do a better job next time.
Its good to have a little algorithm memorized for how to act. This is a good algorithm for a generally well-behaved toddler, but each child at each stage will need something adapted to them. The important part is that the flow is:
Memorizedbyparents and children
Consistently administered
Fair and gentle
We do not need to physically harm our children. The “rod of correction” was traditionally a staff with pricks sticking out from it used to beat up wolves and poke sheep back in line when they were straying from the fold. It was not to beat up the sheep for disobedience. We should not hurt and abuse our children mentally, emotionally, physically, nor spiritually. We are expected to help them avoid sin, but absolutely not at the cost of sinning ourselves to do so.
It is hard to relate to Mary’s motherhood sometimes because she was full of Grace and had God Himself as her Child, but in determining appropriate correction it is helpful to think about how Mary would treat our own children if she were to find herself in the same situation.
With loss of privileges patiently and consistently enforced, appropriate-timed teachings about the purpose of obedience, and most importantly a lot of prayer; our loaves and fishes of discipline can turn into an abundance of obedience.
Loss of Privileges
The consequences that fall into the category of losing privileges make the most sense when they are in response to persistent behaviors. If we find ourselves going through the same disciplining process for the same things many times a day for many days, we should consider a loss of privilege consequence. For this to work the girl should be old enough to understand that the disobedience led to the loss of privilege. Especially with younger girls, its more effective to take from them something that they remember many times throughout the day and reinforcing the lesson at each time. For example, if we take away a doll because they lied, they are likely to ask for the doll many times and we can prompt them each time so that they themselves are able to tell us that she can’t have the doll because she lied. Even though we think older girls should be able understand things more easily, it’s still going to more effective for them the more frequent reminders they have. This is in contrast to taking away something that seems bigger, but will come up less frequently such as ice cream on the Lord’s Day or canceling an activity that’s supposed to happen a week from now. We want them to learn sooner rather than later. A consequence at a later date also creates a gap in time in which we are not helping them with the issue. A less severe consequence that gives us more opportunities to reinforce the lesson is less about punishing and more about teaching. As much as we want to avoid the disobedience “in the meantime,” we also want to avoid arriving at the date of the consequence and having to either enforce a consequence for a behavior they are no longer doing or cancel a consequence that we imposed.
Loss of privileges should be progressively severe as disobedience persists rather than too severe early on, or too lax after persistence. This can be discouraging or have them adopt an attitude of feeling as if the disobedience is “worth it” given the predictable consequence. For that same reason, they don’t need to be communicated ahead of time. It is helpful for them if they are somewhat related to the disobedience for the purpose of having the lesson remembered.
It may be helpful for us, in turn, to have a few consequences in the back pocket and to pray for a breath when coming up with one on the fly. The helps us manage the risk of being too severe or confusing in the midst of our upsetness.
A few ideas for losses of privileges:
Losing a toy for the rest of the hour, day, week, etc.
Having to sit until a timer beeps.
Losing a treat or a favorite food.
Losing a desired outing or activity.
Rules
Our children will most likely develop a favorite go-to set of unacceptable behaviors that they like to engage in. Our main focus here should be on prevention. Rules are for those behaviors that we are unable to prevent.
A good way to organize our children’s rules is by:
Selecting the situations that we need rules for – For example: school time, play time, dining, Church, car, outings, outdoors, bathroom, etc. We should stick to the minimum possible
Choosing 3 rules per situation. We don’t have to reprimand everything we don’t like. Only those behaviors that we can’t prevent and may lead to them hurting themselves have to be rules. Anything else is optional. Hopefully we don’t have three dangerous behaviors that we can’t prevent. If we do, it is best to avoid that situation until our children are able to do it safely. So the purpose of the additional rules is training purposes. Even a perfectly behaved child should have 3 rules, so that through practicing them, they may learn the important skill of obeying rules.
Memorizing them together – Reminding ourselves and our children of the rules at the onset of a situation is crucial for learning, for improvement in obedience, and preventing confusion and misunderstandings when disobedience occurs.
Helping Our Children
The Grace of God is simply His Holy Help. He is able to give His Grace and His Help to our children directly, and through us. If there is something we can do to help our children obey the rules, avoid behaving unacceptably, and fulfill a command, lets do it. We should take on as much of the burden as possible off of the precious gifts of God that we have been entrusted to. If we think of their sin as having more of a bearing on our guilt than theirs, then the Fear of God can help us in this. And if we think of their tender and innocent weakness in the face of temptations, then our compassion for them can help us in this. We should always prevent them when we can. We should explain to them about temptation and remind them to always “flee away.” We should give them consequences that prevent rather than punish. We should always remind them (and ourselves) that, no matter what they do, we will always forgive them, we will always love them, and God will always forgive and love them better than us.
Let us pray that we may be generous with our help, gentle in our correction, and constant in our discipline, and that our children may grow to joyfully and diligently obey the Lord. Amen.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.
Saint Monica, pray for us.
Saint Rita, pray for us.
Saints Perpetua and Felicity, pray for us.
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.
Saint Zellie Martin, pray for us.
Saint Giovanni Bosco, pray for us.
All Saintly mothers in Heaven, pray for us.