Home Built Discipline

This is an excerpt (chapter one) from "Home Built Discipline" by Raymond and Dorothy Moore

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A Commonsense Guide to Discipline

Recently our guests were a young professional couple with two boys, James and John, ages five and three.  Their names may seem common enough, but the little boys were anything but ordinary.  James was highly organized, whether he was playing with LEGO Bricks or filling the dishwasher or helping his parents pack their car.

John was one of the most cognitively mature three-year-olds we have met; his reasoning was well advanced for his age.  he did not yet have much interest in organization, but he was always evaluating situations or people or things.  He was a real charmer.  Often he came around to tell us how much he enjoyed being with us.  He would say, "I love you, but I like you, too."  And he would compliment a shirt or blouse, anything which pleased his genuine sensitivity and creativity.  Both boys were very bright and better behaved than most youngsters their ages.

Yet it became apparent early in their visit that both of them had a problem that made their father unhappy and was wearing their mother out.  When their parents asked them to run an errand or get dressed or wash or eat with good manners, they often stalled.  Sometimes they were downright obstinate or discourteous.  When their mother offered them a fresh tomato and lettuce salad with carrot and celery sticks on the side, James protested.  And John echoed, "I don't like carrots either!"  At that point their mother, both palms up in a silent appeal for help, turned to my wife.

The boys, apparently victorious, saw her.

Dorothy leaned both of her elbows on the high kitchen counter and held her face on her hands, looking directly at the boys who sat on tall chairs on the other side.

"Would you like me to tell you a story?" she smiled, arching eyebrows already arched high by nature.

"Yes!" responded James, and John quickly echoed, "Yeah, I'd like it."

"Well," she began, "when my children were little, they tried to tell me what they would eat and wouldn't eat and what they would do and wouldn't do.  So I had a plan.  Would you like to know what it was?"

"Yeah," John enthused, always curious.  James was not so sure, but both listened attentively.

"If my children said they didn't want any carrots.  I never argued with them".  The boys smiled knowingly at their mother who stood near my wife.  "I told them they didn't have to eat the carrots now."

The boys' grins widened.

Then my wife added, "I told them they could get down from the table."

James frowned.  "Then when did they eat?"

"At the next meal."

"No more food?"

"No more food until the next meal, not even a snack."

"Not even a snack. . ." came the echo from the three-year-old, who looked first at Dorothy, then at his big brother.

"Mama", said John, lifting a carrot stick, "I like carrots." James quickly joined him. "I like everything you fix."

That brief exchange set off one of the smoothest weekends we have ever had with a family of children.  My wife had an advantage, of course, since she was not with the boys every day (there is nothing wrong with parents using other adults discreetly).  But the boys were obviously impressed by Dorothy's decisiveness and the certainty and security that comes from such authority.

Prevention Rather Than Remedy

The best way to establish discipline in any situation -- at home, in the classroom, on the playground, in the office, or elsewhere -- is to get there before trouble starts, or at least before your tolerance turns to frustration.  Select the simplest possible solution that is right and true and carry it out with consistency.  This solution may not be perfect, but it is the best within your framework of experience.  And you will learn more by experience, much more.

You will do your children no favor to allow them to grow up undisciplined.  Those who are allowed to have their own way are restless, discontent, and insecure -- like a ship without a rudder, tossed by the wind and waves of expediency.  Lack of discipline is the most common complaint of teachers who indicate its serious interference with their goals in the classroom.  Parents, too, find ways to get obnoxious children out of their way as much as possible, hoping the problem will go away so they will not have to bother.  Because undisciplined children are not likely to receive as much positive feedback and attention from adults as well-disciplined children, they are often hampered in mental development.

Both prevention and remedy of misbehavior generally follow identical principles.  Prevention is a matter of untilizing these methods to plan ahead -- before misbehaviour.  Remedy is uing them after it starts.

Delinquency is often predicted by five social factors.  The five factors are: (1) affection of father for the child, (2) discipline by the father, (3) affection of the mother for the child, (4) supervision and discipline by the mother, and (5) cohesiveness of the family.

More than any other influence, the education and circumstances of your children in their early, impressionable years determines the direction of their lives.  If you fail to teach the basic lessons of respect, obedience and self-control, your home will crumble.  A wise parent soon finds that prevention is a great insurance policy, available at a much lower price than remedy.

Plan ahead and work your plan.  If more remedy is needed, it also pays to understand the principles . . . and your children!  Among the best examples of such planning and follow-through we have ever seen were, of all things, two bald eagles.

Treetop Disciplinarians

Thirty miles or so up the Columbia River Gorge from our home, I watched the huge eagles as they laid plans for their young.  I was staying alone for a few days at a dear friend's cabin to do some writing by a little mountain lake on the north side of the gorge.  My host first pointed out the female, perched high on a cedar where the treetop had broken off or been mutilated years ago.  She and later her mate were apparently freshening and strengthening an old nest, always cooperating and responding to each other, as they did later with their young.

Eventually the big birds found the nest secure enough to settle down and get ready to raise a family.  They seemed as systematic as a skillfully programmed computer.  They had done their work.  Now they could rest and wait for the hatching, some weeks away.

Sure enough, a few weeks later, when some of us were again in  the area, we watched through binoculars what appeared to be some scuffling in the nest.  Shortly an eaglet was tipped out, and it fluttered toward the ground.  The big eagle retrieved the birdling before it touched ground and took it higher into the sky where it again let it go, eventually bringing the process with others of its young.  After several days of this patient process, the exercise became more like play as the little birds were flying on their own.  They had learned from the precise, consistent example and assistance of their parents.

Even then the parents remained on guard wherever the eaglets flew.  The big birds had instinctive plans for every stage of their offspring's growth and were ready for every emergency, since they thoroughly understood the development of their young.  The lives of those eaglets depended on the care and training given by their parents.

So with our children.  Although parents have instincts, too, humans have an advantage:  We are endowed with reason.  Our responsibility for planning the deportment of our young is as much greater than the eagle's as reason is greater than instinct.  Considering the length of human life, the time allowed for a child's training is brief at best.  Hardly a week goes by that we don't hear parents or grandparents wish out loud that they had not let incidentals and minor preoccupations keep them from spending more time with their children.

The eagles were prepared at evey turn.  They instinctively thought ahead.  For you and me age-old wisdom suggests that "a stitch in time saves nine" or "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."  Although we are deeply concerned with remedy and will deal with it later in this book, wise parents plan ahead.

In general, mothers are the ones charged with the primary responsibilities of discipline because of their longer and closer association with their young children.  Still, a father's support in helping a mother maintain a consistent, solid front is essential.  Nothing is more confusing to a child or damaging to good discipline than parents who have conflicting disciplinary methods or points of view.

Building a Foundation

Read carefully the brief chapters in this book that cover your children's development.  Make up your mind to proceed deliberately; buddy with your spouse, or with another single parent if you are now alone.  Be optimistic, and watch the results!

Next, apply tested principles and methods on your children.  It will take some character and determination to line them up in sound practices, which other families may ignore.  For example, it will take courage to get your family to bed early when all the kids in the neighborhood are lounging around TV until all hours of the night.  But your investment in determination now will pay off richly later.  Commonsense scheduling may not always be easy, but it is tangible.  You can do it, especially when you set the example.

Remember, also, that the basic framework for discipline is built in the first three years.  Though all is not lost if your child's out of control, retrieval will be much more difficult, mostly because the errors of your techniques (or those of whoever is the reponsible person) must be corrected.  Usually problem children are created by problem adults, and only correction in the adult can change the child -- with much more pain and frustration than would have been necessary earlier.

Controls That Bring Self-Discipline

So much for your own foundation.  Now for building specific controls, which, whether for prevention or remedy, lead to sound discipline.  There are at least ten building blocks that come nearer than other to making discipline pleasant and almost automatic.  They are priceless, because love is priceless, and their price is an abundance of love.  They are infinitely more effective than bribing or indulging your children.  They will go a long way toward making deprivation and the switch unnecessary.

Part Three of this book will explore these building blocks fully.  We lay them down here in the ten short chapters which follow.  They are not necessarily arranged in order of importance, since all are crucial to a strong, pleasant program of discipline: (1) warm responsiveness and example; (2) routine, regularity, and order; (3) constructive work and play; (4) service to others; (5) camaraderie, courtesy, and communication; (6) consistency and unity; (7) learning how to think; (8) encouragement and appreciation, sometimes with rewards; (9) health, including diet, dress, sleep, and exercise; and (10) management of money.

Running down through all these short chapters is the strand of implicit authority.  It will be weak or strong, depending on you, your understanding of your children and the way they develop, your consistency, your responsiveness, and your example.  Children, like soldiers or office workers or students at school, should have only that freedom or authority for which they can handle equal or commensurate responsibility.  You won't ask a two-year-old to start a fire in the stove or a ten-year-old to drive your car.  You will be alert to their development and abilities, always monitoring to insure the authority-responsibility balance.

When remedy is necessary, deprivation of privileges and even a spanking will be better understood by children who know they are appreciated, for they trust you.  The fact that you care enough to deal with them forthrightly and consistently impresses them clearly that you love them.  Child license -- freedom with responsibility -- is no freedom at all.  Children do not feel safe with you or that you care when you let them do whatever they want to do.  In summary, the best of all roads to obedience and control is the one paved by parents who show love to one another -- the father who offers kindly attention to the mother and the mother who shows loving respect to the father.  We do not speak of sentimentality but of selfless affection based on mutual regard.  This always builds self-respect and self-control in all members of the family.  Children should learn such respect for parents and others from their earliest years, helping in every way they can to make life happier and more secure for others.

The lessons and example of the eagle are safe guides in principle for you and your children.  Their cooperation and responsiveness to each other, their instinctive order and routine, their constructive mixture of work and play, the consistency of their example, and their obvious encouragement of their young are worth our reflection and that of our children.  Here we have the foundation for great discipline.

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