M E R I D I A N M A G A Z I N E
How to Civilize a Child
By Orson Scott Card
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Vigor Magazine, which is now associated with Nauvoo.com. To read part 1, click here.
The pattern I'm about to tell you works. I have
never seen it fail. My wife and I have used it with four children who are amazingly
good, loving, happy, righteous, creative, free-spirited, and patient —
in short, civilized. We have also seen it used by friends and family members,
with similar effects. The details of the process are infinitely adaptable; the
fundamental principles must be followed without fail.
Set Clear Rules. You have to decide exactly what standard of
behavior you are going to expect of a little child. Once you set these rules
you are as bound by them as the children are. You must follow them yourselves.
Our family's sacrament meeting rules for toddlers are fairly simple. Because
sacrament meeting is a time that belongs to the whole congregation for the purpose
of learning about and communing with the Lord:
(Other families have tighter rules. I let my three-year-old
daughter pull my beard and play with my tie, which other families might regard
as disorderly or disrespectful behavior. I see such familiarities as a necessary
counterpoint to my sternness when teaching her discipline. As long as she is
not distracting other children or making noise, the particular rules are up
to us.)
Confinement
Confinement can be viewed as a punishment, but
if you do it properly it can be more positive than that. Traditional punishments
— spanking, depriving the child of a toy or treat, and so on — are
usually counterproductive. Since the point is to teach the child that sacrament
meeting is a time for silence and stillness, it hardly makes sense to punish
the child in ways that cause him or her to make more noise!
We do not resort to confinement at the first peep. Rather, we give one reminder,
and take into account whether the infraction was willful or inadvertent. You
must first make sure there are no physical causes for the child's fitfulness.
An uncomfortable diaper, an earache, an upset stomach, or the beginning of a
fever can cause disruptive behavior, and the solution is not discipline.
Tolerance must include more than physical distress, I believe. A child can't
help laughing at something funny — so you remind him (and any accomplices)
to stop the activity that resulted in laughter. A child falling off the bench
is inadvertent — but the same child slowly sliding off the bench while
watching you for a reaction, even after one reminder, is testing your discipline,
and you must not fail him. When a child is clearly determined to break a rule,
confinement must begin immediately, so the child can clearly understand exactly
what he did to cause you to confine him.
Since confinement will only be used with toddlers, you can still hold the child
easily in your arms, and overpower all attempts at resistance. The process begins
at the bench in sacrament meeting — but you never attempt to stay in the
meeting during the confinement. Instead, you scoop the child up and leave for
the foyer immediately. This usually silences the child for the duration of the
trip to the foyer.
The moment you reach the foyer, however, you must follow an unvarying pattern:
Self-Discipline
This process is much harder for the parent than
it is for the child. You have to school your own emotions, for it doesn't do
at all for you to become angry or impatient with the child — he must see
and feel that your love and concern for him are real.
You also have to refuse to become distracted. The activities in the foyer can
as easily distract you as the child. The worst interference comes from uncivilized
adults, who think that because you're in the foyer, it's a great chance to chat.
All you owe such adults is a brief, polite statement: “Excuse me, but
I can't talk right now.” If they persist in trying to talk to you, they
are the ones being unbelievably rude, and you have no choice but to turn your
back and walk away from them. If the other activities in the foyer are so distracting
that you can't keep your child focused on your face, then you have to leave
— walk outside or down the hall to an empty classroom.
When singing, you must not sing playful songs, or confinement will become a
game, and this must never happen. The goal of confinement is stillness, not
laughter or fun.
Because the child will usually cry when confinement begins, it is easy for you
to lose your original purpose — to help the child acquire the self-control
to remain quiet in sacrament meeting — and get sidetracked onto a completely
different purpose — getting the child to stop crying and act happy. The
latter purpose will lead you to play with the child, and at that moment
you have utterly failed. By making the foyer experience a game, the child
has learned that at the cost of a brief period of tears, he then gets to play
with his parent in the foyer. Your failure at this moment is complete.
Instead, you must remember that stillness is your goal, and if your child tries
to play with you, you must refuse. “No, sweetheart, this isn't playtime.
We can play quietly in sacrament meeting, but we can't play out here. Out here
we have to be quiet so we can get ready to go back into the meeting.”
Ignore Criticism
There will no doubt be people in your ward who
will see what you're doing and criticize you for it. Or you will be so uncomfortable
with your parental role that you will imagine they are criticizing you. After
all, your child is crying, and you caused it. Therefore you must be a bad, abusive
parent. Right?
Wrong.
You are not venting your rage. You are not inflicting pain (though the child's
struggles against your unyielding arms may cause pain). Your child is not receiving
anything but loving guidance from you. Your child's furious tears are the same
tears he will shed someday no matter what. Better to shed those tears in your
arms, as a toddler, than to shed them years later, when his inability to control
himself has led him to grief.
It is exactly analogous to taking your toddler for his shots. He sees the needle.
He fears the doctor because he's been given injections before. You don't lie
to the child; you say, “It does hurt a little, but be brave. Here, I'm
with you, I'm holding you, and even though it hurts, it will help you stay healthy
and strong. Can you hold still and help the doctor do this?”
You take the child for the shot, and the child
cries, and you caused it! But it is the parent who yields to his child's weeping
and does not get the injections who is the bad parent. The good parent is not
afraid of his child's necessary tears.
After all, we're supposed to be the grown-ups. We're supposed to do the right
thing even when it hurts.
Fathers, This Is Your Job
I have been saying “parent” throughout, and when the father is not
available, the mother can and indeed must go through this process. But when
the father is present, this is his job, and not because of some arbitrary notion
of patriarchal responsibility.
The fact is that children respond differently to fathers. I don't know a mother
who hasn't had the frustrating experience of pleading, arguing, yelling, begging,
threatening, even bribing to get a child to do something, only to have the father
come in, speak once, and immediately get the obedience that the mother could
not get no matter what she did.
The youngest infants respond differently to their
father's voice. They turn to their mother for comfort. What they crave from
their father is judgment. They fear their father's disapproval; they long for
their father's praise. This means that an ounce of discipline from the father
can be more effective than pounds of it from the mother, though this varies
from child to child.
Unless your work requires you to be away from home, it is vital that you be
there for every sacrament meeting during this crucial time in each toddler's
life. Even if you are in the bishopric or are ward clerk and your calling normally
would take you away from your family's pew, explain what you are doing and sit
with your family during that time — or, failing that, watch closely so
that you can swoop down from the stand and scoop up your child when the need
arises. It would take your wife far longer to accomplish the same task, and
would probably cost her more emotionally than it will cost you.
What Children Get
Children are all different, and this process has been different for all four
of our children. My first boy learned very quickly. A few trips to the foyer
and he never had to be disciplined again for irreverence until he was eleven,
at which time one quick reminder was all it took.
My first daughter, however, was stubborn. I think some people in our ward in
South Bend, Indiana, must have thought I was inactive for about six months,
since I spent every sacrament meeting in the foyer. Part of the problem, though,
was my ineptitude — I had not yet learned the rule about keeping her facing
me and talking to her kindly throughout. I suspect I would have succeeded far
faster had she not been on my lap, facing all the distractions of the foyer
instead of focusing on my voice and face.
Even so, she gradually learned that if she stayed
still in sacrament meeting, she got loving, quiet attention from her parents
and her older brother, and she, too, was fully able to stay quiet in sacrament
meeting long before she turned three — so that the struggle is lost in
the time before memory, and only the skill of self-control carried forward into
her conscious life.
Our second son was afflicted with cerebral palsy, and we were unable to determine
how well he understood us. He was also a happy child, and the few times he made
noise we took him out but with no attempt at confinement. Not until he was about
six years old did we begin to attempt to teach him stillness in sacrament meeting
— and we paid the price of delay.
He was already too old to learn from confinement,
and so we did not attempt it. Instead we took him to the foyer and explained
the rules to him, emphasizing the need to allow others to hear the sermons.
We did not play with him in the foyer, of course; and while it was an entertaining
change of scenery, he knew we were displeased and gradually learned to keep
silent in meetings except when he had a physical need. This moral choice was
complete before he was baptized.
At the time this essay was originally written, our three oldest were nineteen,
sixteen, and thirteen years old. But we also had a three-year-old, and I'm happy
to report that she successfully completed her basic course in civilization —
when she was two. By age three, she required an occasional lifted eyebrow or
finger to the lips urging quiet, but she obeyed all the rules without complaint.
She looked forward to going to church, and while it's nursery that she was eager
for, she was perfectly content to climb up into her place on the bench.
Not only that, but she was already learning to
be genuinely aware of the meeting, watching for each step in the sacrament,
reverently taking her own bread and cup. She bowed her head and folded her arms
for the prayers, not because we made her do it, but because she wanted to be
part of the meeting.
During the months of training her, my older children were bemused at the process.
Did you do that with me? they asked. We told them all about what their training
was like. And we realized that the skills they were seeing us teach the littlest
were the very skills that had served them well in all their associations: The
ability to be silent at will, to hold still and pay attention. The skills that
teachers and bosses demand, that friends expect, that loved ones need. And along
with that specific skill, the ability to delay gratification, to resist temptation,
to foresee the consequences of their choices.
And another benefit: They never doubted that we loved them and cared what they
did. That, too, came partly from those struggles over stillness in sacrament
meeting.
Will this work with every child? Children with serious behavioral disorders
are not going to respond to this — but such problems are rare and usually
show up long before sacrament meeting reverence becomes an issue. For most toddlers
this training process works — every bit as well as the more common practice
of training little ones to behave disruptively.
Orderly Progress
The rules for toddlers, of course, are not the rules for older children. But the changes should not be arbitrary. In the family I grew up in, my parents set specific ages. Along with baptism at eight years old, for instance, we knew for years in advance that we would then be expected to fast one of the two meals on fast Sunday; by twelve, both meals.
Similarly, there was a set age at which books and
toys had to be set aside during meetings, and because the transition was linked
to our age, we would have been ashamed to continue doing something so clearly
marked as “childish.”
Age-linked progression is at the heart of orderly life in the Church, and parents
do their children and their neighbors no favor when they violate that order
by not expecting their children to live up to those rules. (An obvious example
is the rule against dating before age 16. When parents succumb to their children's
pleading for early exceptions, usually because their child is so “mature,”
they harm the child by teaching contempt for good order and by promoting the
idea that the child is too good for the rules; and they harm the entire community
by making it that much harder for other parents to hold to the rule while maintaining
peace at home.)
If compliance to rules of good order were perfect,
those rules would not chafe. Children suffer only when they see other children
not being bound by those rules.
There is no clearer example than the rule that children should sit with their
families during sacrament meeting. If all parents would insist on this rule,
the teenagers would all bear it pleasantly enough; only when many teenagers
are free to wander the building or to sit in unruly clumps far from adult supervision
does the burden of sitting with one's family become shameful to the few teenagers
whose parents are trying to help maintain order.
The rules don't have to be insanely strict, of course. Once our children reached
the age of twelve, we permitted them, if they asked, to sit with friends —
but only if the friends were sitting with their own family, so that adult supervision
and reverent attention to the meeting were assured. And they had to get permission
each time, permission which was only granted if we knew that the family was
one that made an effort to maintain reverence. (It must also be said that permission
was never denied under this rule, because our children never asked to sit with
a family that did not make the effort.)
Cooperation among Families
Training toddlers to be reverent is something each
family can do entirely on its own, regardless of what the rest of the ward is
doing. Of course our little ones hear the noise made by toddlers who are being
trained to make noise in church, but at such moments we pat our little one affectionately
and thank her (in a whisper) for being so quiet. “See how hard it is to
hear the speaker with all that noise? But you never make noise like that. We're
so proud of you.”
Does this teach our children to look down on those who misbehave? I should hope
so. It would be madness to think that we could teach virtues to children without
also teaching them to hold the opposite of those virtues in low esteem. You
cannot praise good behavior without, by implication, criticizing bad behavior.
Of course we teach our children never to look down on someone for something
he cannot help; and we teach them never to treat anyone badly or to talk someone
down. But within our family we candidly discuss our own failings and the lapses
of others, because only by recognizing error can we learn to avoid it.
I cannot imagine serious moral teaching without it. Jesus had no qualms about
naming folly and hypocrisy when he saw them, even as he kindly and patiently
embraced the repentant sinner. And so we have no qualms about thanking and praising
our children for their obedience and their contribution to the good order of
the community, often in pointed contrast to those who do not obey or contribute.
This is not to lift ourselves above others: We
are just as quick to point out our own lapses and errors, as well as the lapses
and errors of our children. A community that is afraid to name offenses is doomed
to drown in them.
As children get older, however, parents are no longer their sole wellspring
of approval. By the junior high years, children acquire enormous power over
each other, and this power gravitates to the most arrogant and disdainful of
the children. Parents find that their child is much more afraid of the contempt
of a peer than of the disapproval of his parents.
It is at this point that it becomes vital for all
the parents of a ward to be united in enforcing the rules of good order in the
ward, or chaos results. The children whose parents fail to enforce the rules
are cut adrift and unhappy, many of them pushing farther and farther away from
the Church in the effort to find some point at which their parents care enough
to draw a line. Meanwhile, and the children whose parents still try to enforce
the rules suffer either from conflict with their parents or isolation from their
peers.
Yet if every family, or all but one or two, insist that their teenagers sit
with an orderly family in sacrament meeting and attend all their meetings, there
will be no peer pressure and far less conflict over the matter. The kids can
whine to each other all they want, but the result is that good order is maintained,
the children know their parents care what they do, the teenagers have a chance
of actually hearing and learning from sacrament meeting, the younger children
see the example of the older children complying with the rules of reverence
— and all this without rifts being created among the teenagers themselves.
Make no mistake about it: All parents who permit their teenagers to sit anywhere
but with their families in sacrament meeting are committing an offense against
every other family in the ward, and wards that are plagued by teenagers roaming
the building during meetings should agree together to repent all at once, so
that no one family is thrown into sharp conflict within the home. And this,
too, would be a great help in the teaching of toddlers.
And you who complain about the lack of reverence in our meetings, make sure
you aren't part of the problem. How much whispering and note-passing do you
do? Do you think the children don't see? Do you wink and play with children
on other benches? Do you let your children tempt other families' kids to break
their rules of reverence? Does your anger at noisy families introduce a spirit
of contention and division in the ward? When you are out in the foyer, do you
chat with other adults, thus making it impossible for you and harder for others
to hear the meeting?
Instead of making it harder for each other, we should be making it easier. If
a lone parent is struggling to deal with a group of unruly children, offer to
help. “I'd be happy to sit with your other children if you need to take
the little one out.” At the very least you can make sure that the unruly
child who leans over the bench in front of you never sees you doing anything
interesting, but rather sees your entire bench full of people looking toward
the speaker, listening intently.
Every Mormon ward is a village, with all the drawbacks and all the advantages
of village life. If all parents would establish clear rules for their
children, and, by persuasion and longsuffering, labor to bring them into compliance
with good rules of behavior, not only would our sacrament meetings no longer
sound like zoos, but within a generation our foyers would be empty because everyone
would be in the meeting.
Our children and each new generation of adults, blessed with skills of self-control learned young, would find themselves living in a world that was more civilized because Mormon parents, at least, were no longer raising barbarian children.
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