Last summer Tim and I vacationed in the mountains with Tim’s brother Mark, Mark’s wife, Katie, and their then five children. Our Rebecca was three-and-a-half, Angela eighteen months, and I was seven months pregnant with baby Lucy.
During the long afternoons, Mark and Tim took the older kids for hikes through the dusty pinewoods or motored the boat out onto the lake to cast for trout. Katie and I stayed in the cabin and talked while the aspen shuddered outside the picture window and the little kids napped. Once, when describing her frustration in trying to discipline her children, Katie told me: “Sometimes I spend the whole day”—her eyes grew wide, her jaw clenched, and her voice rose an octave—”TALKING TO MY KIDS LIKE THIS.” I laughed in recognition.
“We have some friends” Katie continued, “Debbie and Kevin Brock. They have the best-behaved children I’ve ever seen, and they never talk to their kids the way I talk to mine. Debbie says that if you’re yelling, you’ve already lost the battle.”
I called Kevin Brock last week to ask him about discipline. It seems I’ve been losing too many battles lately with Rebecca and Angela. Kevin and Debbie and their seven children live in the Seattle area. Debbie has spoken at home-schooling conferences about family time management. Kevin writes and gives talks on discipline and childrearing.
“It’s interesting,” Kevin told me over the phone, “our oldest child is fourteen, and we’re not done with discipline yet. It’s a developing process.”
Interrupted momentarily by a small, whispered voice, Kevin answered his daughter’s question, then said, “And please close the door.” A pause. “Thank you.”
“Above all, it’s a philosophy,” Kevin turned again to me and the question of discipline, “a recognition through grace that you’re really interested in seeing the end product, where you’d like to see the child at age twenty-five, a child formed in the faith. Then you determine what are the best steps to take to form the child in the faith. The technical steps are going to be different for each family and different for each child. And let me add that a lot of what we’ve done has been in consultation with other families who have gone before us and seen what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. We’ve also read a lot of good books. James Stenson and James Dobson come to mind.”
“To give faith the best chance to take root in the child,” Kevin said, “a good, solid character has to be formed. And for a good character to be formed, there has to be an assimilation of virtues. Our faith teaches us that there are two types of virtues, the moral virtues and the cardinal virtues—the moral being faith, hope, and charity; the cardinal being justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Children have almost none of these. Virtues take root with practice and with self-discipline. Children are incapable of self-discipline. For self-discipline to take place, the parents have to supply the discipline at first. There’s an analogy to baptism. A child is baptized into the faith at a time when he is incapable of faith. So the parents step forward to supply the faith.”
According to Brock, the technical process of how children acquire self discipline has been articulated by others.
“There are four stages,” Brock said, “with the most intense stages coming in the early years and the less intense coming later. The first stage, from infancy through about age six, is behavior modification. The second stage, from age five or six through adolescence, is training. These are the golden opportunity years. The teen years are the coaching stage. And the final stage is advising, because being a parent never ends.
“Our philosophy is that stage one sets the ground work for the subsequent stages. Stage one requires the most work and the most diligence. It also has the most heartache and the most self-questioning. The world doesn’t want children to acquire virtues. The world produces a cacophony of contradictory instructions. And children emerge confused.”
He paused for a moment. “The bottom line is: It must be done. In a loving context. By the age of five, you must have a child who is largely compliant and recognizes parental authority. If you can get through the hard work of stage one, it makes all the difference. Parents who avoid the hard work end up still doing battle as the child gets older.”
With his own children, Kevin has found the battle begins on the changing table. “At a certain age, they start to squirm and try to crawl away. You teach them they must be still, that they can’t do everything they want. As they get older, you learn to understand your own temperament and the child’s temperament. Some of our children have required spanking, some have responded to less. We also don’t totally baby-proof the house. We look for opportunities to teach boundaries. If they crawl too close to the fireplace tools, we tell them, ‘No.’ If they do it again, they get a little slap on the fingers, and they learn. After the hard work of stage one,” he said, “you see them emerge as different children. They become largely self-controlled. In our experience, spanking rarely occurs after age five, almost never after age seven.”
He also emphasized the importance of positive incentives. “Especially when it comes to developing good spiritual habits, like saying prayers properly. You can’t spank a child into saying a good rosary. Instead we might say, ‘If you say the rosary properly for the next week, there will be a treat.’ Then we’ll go to Baskin-Robbins at the end of the week.
“As you move into the second stage,” Kevion continued, “the children must be given chores and more personal responsibility. We usually start them emptying the dishwasher at age four. Once again, discipline has to be encouraged. We tell the children they’ll do chores and do them well. If the chore isn’t done well, they’ll get another chore to do.”
He paused again. I heard another voice in the background. “Debbie’s reminding me of another point: the almost medicinal effect of the daily reading of the lives of the saints, even for very young children. We’ll walk into a room and find a child kneeling before the cross doing a devotion on his own because he’s heard about one of the saints doing it. It’s better than Ritalin.” Kevin laughed.
“You also have to have cohesiveness and unanimity between Mom and Dad. If one parent is incapable of certain techniques, then let the other parent do it. And don’t sabotage that parent’s efforts.”
Even Kevin has his moments of self-doubt. “There’s constant second guessing,” he told me. “Sometimes I think our oldest bore the brunt of too much discipline. Our youngest is enjoying less discipline.”
As he got ready to hang up, he said, “Debbie’s also reminding me of one last point. Parents shouldn’t despair if they’re just now realizing the need to discipline. It’s never too late. It’s more difficult if the kids are older. But it’s our obligation. Discipline falls under our duty as the first and foremost educators of our children.”
When I’d hung up the phone, I stepped out into the fray to begin the battle anew.