• Obedience and justice need to be closely related to how you discipline your children. Parents must make their own decisions about methods of discipline, but certain principles apply.
• Children should be disciplined in private rather than public
• Children will repeat the activities that attract the greatest attention. The key, therefore, is to give more attention for doing something right than for doing something wrong. Give lavish, open praise for the right and quiet, automatic discipline for the wrong.
• Children should know the reasons for the laws they are expected to keep and should think of obedience in terms of observing laws, not in terms of obeying people.
• Children find great security in consistent, predictable discipline.
• Discipline should be thought of as a way of teaching truth.
• Punishments should be administered only when laws are broken. When children make wrong decisions in areas not governed by law, their punishment should come through the natural consequences of those wrong choices (if a child forgets his coat, he gets cold and needs no other punishments).

In this house (points to one of the houses) lived the Smith family. They had a boy and a girl named Steve and Sue. And they had no family laws. They didn’t have to come to dinner at any certain time or go to bed at any certain time. They didn’t have to put away their toys, they didn’t have to find their mother and father, they could watch television any time they wanted. (Point to the other house.) In this house lived the Jones family. They had a boy named Jimmy and a girl named Jane. They had family laws, and the children knew that they would be punished if they broke the laws.

Now, let’s pretend we can see right inside each of these houses and watch what is happening. Let’s look into the Smiths’ house first. Look at Steve and Sue’s rooms. They look like pigpens. Nothing is ever put away; everything is on the floor. But where are Steve and Sue? Oh, there’s Sue watching television. Her homework’s not done. She’ll be sorry tomorrow when the teacher asks her a question and she doesn’t know the answer. There’s Steve across the fence playing with a friend. His mom called him for dinner, but he didn’t come. Now his food is cold and soggy. Look, his face is scratched from a fight with Sue over a toy. They don’t even have laws against fighting.

Let’s look inside the Joneses’ house. Jimmy’s and Janie’s clothes and toys are all neat and tidy, because their family has a law about that. Their family members are all sitting together having a nice dinner, because they have a law about that. Jimmy and Jane did their homework before dinner, because they have a law for that too. When they’re finished eating, they will be able to play and not worry about schoolwork that’s not done.

One drop of food coloring can illustrate how holding one little grudge can make us miserable all over.

Our seven- and nine-year-old boys went through a little phase when they were fascinated with food coloring. They liked to make their milk blue and their eggs green. They also, unfortunately, experimented with coloring things other than food.

The fascination happened to come during the month we were trying to teach them the value of forgiveness and mercy. One of the boys had been carrying a grudge against a friend who had said something mean to him several weeks before.

I took a bottle of clear, clean water and told the boys that it represented their feelings and their joy in life. Then I put a single drop of red food coloring in the bottle and we watched the whole jar gradually turn pink. Then we talked about grudges and how one little one can make us feel bad all over. We talked about “poison” as another metaphor. Then we talked about forgiveness.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. Every secret is told, every crime is punished. Every virtue is rewarded, every wrong is redressed, silence and certainly… cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed, for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”