Training in Docility

MANY parents complain that they can no longer get their children to obey.

Is it the fault of the children? Is it not rather the fault of the parents? A failure in obedience because of a failure in authority?

To command requires as much abnegation as to obey. If a person commands to satisfy his need of imposing himself on others, to satisfy his vanity, to prove his power to himself, he has missed the purpose of authority. Authority does not exist for itself but for the good of subordinates.

Parents can go to the other extreme and let their children to their whims and fancies in order to escape imposing any inconvenience upon themselves, allowing everything to pass and even refusing to forbid what they should forbid. That too is a failure in their mission. To have authority is to have the obligation to exercise it—according to the circumstances and without exaggeration certainly—but it must be exercised and not held in abeyance; that would be a betrayal of a trust.

Authority is to be exercised; to be exercised within the limits of its control; that is its function. If through laziness or poor judgment authority is not exercised or is badly exercised, how can we be astonished that obedience is lost?

Authority supposes a soul at peace, a courageous soul, dominated by a sense of duty, devoted to the interests of the subject, free of capricious impulses and that sentimental concept of love which is often found in mothers who confuse tenderness with idolatry.

Parents and educators must arm themselves with courage to dare to take a stand against the caprices of their child. They must have keen judgment to know in which instances they should command or refrain from commanding, to be able to adapt the order to the capacity of the subjects, to be able to understand the subjects‟ desires and satisfy them, to oppose their whims, their impetuous desires and disordered impulses.

In all this there must not be the shadow of oppression. Parents should realize the children’s need for distractions, activity, learning, and loving. They ought to satisfy them in everything that is legitimate. That will provide a generous principle by which they can refuse them what is not legitimate. In everything the parents should act with a balanced mixture of gentleness and firmness.

Certainly they should not govern their children in a way that suppresses their initiative. Their problem is not to develop paragons of perfection, children who are exteriorly docile but docile through passivity.

Parents should as often as possible insist that their children make their own decisions, assume their little or great responsibilities; but at the same time supervise and watch over them unobtrusively; be ready to help them if need be when they hesitate or arrive at imprudent decisions.

This implies that the parents strive less to develop a satisfactory exterior behavior than to fashion in the child a conscience that is exact and clear in the knowledge of its duties; it is essential that when a child obeys he does so not because of external constraint but through obedience to the law of duty, to the inward law formulated in the depths of his soul by God Himself.

The formation of the child’s conscience is therefore inseparable from his training in obedience. Let the child know that he must obey only because he must above all obey God; parents and educators are only the intermediaries of God in his regard. Punishments which must follow wrongdoing will never be for him the indication of his parents‟ excitability or moods but always and only the justification of a moral principle that has been violated.