The Habit of Obedience

"The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless friction with the children. All day she is crying out, "Do this!" and they do it not; "Do that!" and they do the other." -Charlotte Mason

Well dear reader, I can testify that the second half of that quote is indeed true. Most of our days in this household are full of endless friction with the 5 yr old doing "it not and doing the other." I hope as time goes on I will be able to reporty that the first part of the quote is also true. I can certainly use smooth and easy days and I certainly want my kids to grow up with good, strong, and noble characters.

Since deciding to slowly  incorporate a Charlotte Mason style of education with Garrett, I have been reading, pondering, and casually trying to work on habit training. But I had not fully jumped into it until this week. I finally decided it was time to start with the most important habit: obedience. Oh yes, we need to work on this! (Charlotte Mason felt obedience, attention, and truthfulness were the top 3 habits a parent should teach their children She also felt that habit training was a whole 1/3 of education!) 

On Wednesday, while sitting out on the deck, Garrett and I had a discussion about obedience. What it is. The benefits of being obedient. The disadvantages of not being obedient. We talked about Nephi from the Book of Mormon and how obedient he was to both his earthly father and his Heavenly Father.  I tried to get the message across that we would work on this together and was hoping to get his will and my will pointing towards the same goal. I don't know how sucessful I was at that, but I think it went OK.

I have to say, its only been 2 days of us working on this together and I do feel he is trying and improving already. I also feel a bit daunted with some issue- sometimes I feel like "how are we ever going to get over this issue?" (mainly his grumpy attitude, which is probably part of a whole other bad habit to unlearn.) I have also noticed that Garrett has the habit of saying "in a minute" when I ask him to do something. It automatically spews from his mouth. I had never noticed that so clearly. Another observation, and this is the main reason it took me so long to formally jump into this formal habit training process; training my kids in a habit is training myself. I have to work on me. My bad habits. My weaknesses. (One of my parenting weaknesses is I tend to get  permissive because I feel like if I'm not permissive I swing to the other side and I'm down right mean. I use permissiveness to shield me from my mean side.  I don't want to be mean (authoritarian). I don't want to be permissive either but have a hard time finding that authoritative middle ground.) I think another hurdle I have in front of me is not nagging.

So here are the things I"m focusing on with obedience. There are others but these are the ones I'm focusing my attention to the most, for me as the parent. (For time sake, these bullet points are taken directly from the book Laying Down the Rails, A Charlotte Mason Habits Handbook by Sonya Shafer. Things written in parentheses are my own words.)

For me as the parent:

•  Makes obedience a top priority
• Understands that parents are on assignment from God to teach children to obey (basically, its in a parent's job description! This one seems so obvious but I need to hear it sometimes.)

• Expects obedience (!!! So many times as a mom I'll tell my son to do something but deep inside I don't really expect that he will do it and I don't follow through.)
• Uses a quiet but firm tone of voice when telling a child to do something
• Insists on prompt, cheerful, and lasting obedience (this is one I'm not 100% sure how we will work on it.)
• Doesn't give a command unless intends to see it carried out completely. (yeah- totally need to work on this. This means I have to STOP before speaking on auto pilot and consider if its something I really want to say and follow through with.)
• Does not pester the child with excessive commands (I love how Mason points out that a child who is obedient can be trusted with a lot of liberty. There might be a few minor mishaps because of it but generally an obedient child will be able to handle a good dose of freedom.This is very true when it comes to Garrett playing outside. When I can trust he will stay within his boundaries he gets more freedom then if he has to stay in the backyard only because I can't trust him to follow the rules.)
• Yields occasionally in matters that are not crucial
• Gives reasons for commands only when appropriate (this is a big one for me because Garrett will try to talk his way out of things and will try to talk in circles, rationalize, barter, etc over every little thing. It gets old fast and its very time consuming. )
• Gives time to prepare for changes in activities (I think I'm naturally pretty good at this except I don't always follow through when I say "in 10 minutes..." )
• Teaches obedience by the time child is 1 years old (for Tristan, basically applying all the above parenting principles to Tristan as he grows up, in an age appropriate way.)
• (And finally, realizing the ultimate goal is to have children who desire to obey because its the right thing to do. And remembering that kids learn to obey their parents so they can learn to obey laws of the land, social rules, and of coarse, God.)

Wish me luck! If anyone has advice I"m open, keeping in mind my goal is always to be a gentle mama.