Ask Aunt Dorcas: Breaking Their Wills

 Dear Aunt Dorcas,

 Do you have any thoughts or advice to share on the concept of breaking your child’s will? I am referring specifically to Michael and Debbie Pearl’s suggested parenting plan.

                                                     -Erin

Dear Erin--

I’m told that Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen, once said that leading Yemen was like dancing on the heads of snakes.

That’s how I feel addressing this question. But I feel it’s important, so let’s poke it with a stick and see what happens.

Let’s establish a few basics about raising children that we agree on:

1. Human babies are the most helpless of any animal newborns. Baby chicks peck their way out of the egg and pretty soon they’re running to the food dish on their little scratchy feet. Baby sea turtles head for the ocean on their own determined little flippers.

But baby humans will lie there and die without constant and long-term care.

2. It takes a long time to raise a human. We are born not knowing language, survival skills, or how to function in a community. Each of us needs to be nurtured, protected, and taught. Children with minimal care might survive physically, if they’re lucky, but if they aren’t taught the complex rules of interacting in a family, culture, and community, they will not thrive or be healthy members of society.

3. It’s the parents’ job to raise the child into a fully-functioning adult. They might feel that they can’t possibly be grownup enough to be in charge, but if God sends them a baby, then they’re the ones responsible for it. It is their job now. 

4. Raising a child is a big task, and it’s not easy, but we’ve made it more complicated than it ought to be.

We’ve all seen what happens when a child doesn’t get what they need. From the sad barefoot child in the grocery cart ahead of you on a cold day to the untamed wildcat that tears through your house and bounces on the couches to the kids who bullied you at school to the little girl in front of you at church who sat perfectly still until she happened to play with her braids a little bit and her dad reached over and gave her a vicious pinch on the arm that made her sit perfectly still again and filled her love-hungry eyes with tears.

[That last example is pulled from real life, and 25 years later I still want to reach forward and show that black-suited dad what a real pinch feels like.]

So we know what’s at stake if we don’t parent well, and we want desperately to get it right. I think this is why the subject is so fraught with controversy—it matters that much. Despite Scripture, our own childhoods, watching others, and a million books on parenting, there are no simple equations, and the math doesn’t always come out the same for everyone.

We want to get it right. Sometimes it’s because we love our children so much, and other times it’s because we fear the shame if they go wrong.

The first line of the book Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is famous and wise: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

We could all, right now, number our notebook paper from one to ten and list ten kinds of unhappy families, but I prefer to look at what the happy and healthy families have in common.

Off the top of my head, here are eight traits.

Basic stability--Dad isn’t going to walk off. Mom isn’t going to be drunk at breakfast.

Safety--Children don’t live under a cloud of fear and uncertainty.

Nurture—Children are cared for physically and emotionally.

Cohesion—family members are for and not against each other.

Grace—Children are allowed and expected to be children. Behavior is addressed without destroying the worth of the child.

Clarity—children have a good idea of what’s expected of them

Competence—children know they have what it takes to do and contribute what’s expected

Decency--people treat each other with basic respect and kindness

Within those parameters, there’s room for enormous variation. In his book Walking His Trail: Signs of God Along the Way, Steve Saint, son of the martyred missionary Nate Saint, mentions the differences in the childhood homes of his father and aunt, Rachel Saint, and her eventual missionary partner, Elisabeth Elliot.

The Saints were a laidback West Coast family. Schedules and proper manners didn’t matter too much. They valued creativity, fun, and discovery. One weekend, as I recall, the boys wanted to take the family car apart, and their dad shrugged and said it was fine as long as they had it back together to take to work Monday morning.

Elisabeth, on the other hand, was a Howard from the East Coast, and the Howards did things right. Schedules, manners, meals, tidiness, disciplines, all kinds of things. 

I also read The Making of a Christian Family, Elisabeth Elliot’s story of her family, and the properness of it all nearly gave me hives. Interestingly, though, her family loved to laugh, and she relates how some were wonderful storytellers or mimics, and they would shriek and laugh at the dinner table.

Rachel and Elisabeth didn’t work out so well together on the mission field, as one might expect, but the point here is that despite their wildly different upbringing, both women were effective missionaries and good people.

As long as the basics are in place, there’s lots of room for variation.

However, I don’t think there’s room for the Pearl method of “breaking the child’s will.”

This is why: It presumes a basic enmity between parent and child. It puts them against each other.

[Edit: Just to be clear, this "spank until the will is broken" idea was around when my husband was a child, he says, long before the Pearls started their teaching, and it came from multiple sources. So I'm referring more to the general principle than the Pearls' specific methods.]

This is painful for me to address, because it’s too much like the approach I used with my older children.

Somehow, between my birth family, preachers, other parents, and books, I had picked up this idea that my children had a huge and terrifying entity inside that was going to swell up like mutant bread dough and destroy both them and us if we didn’t keep it punched down.

The primary method to accomplish this was punishment, either spanking or some other unpleasant consequence. The general idea was that if it didn’t work, you weren’t doing it enough, kind of like multi-level marketing nutrient supplements.

Well, we had very spirited children, and I loved them to pieces. But I was also terrified of them ending up in prison or Hell, or both, if I let that bread dough ooze over the edge of the bowl.

I was also afraid of what other people thought. This whole era was complicated by my own unresolved issues.

I remember asking other moms for advice, and how utterly unhelpful it was. “Sounds to me like he has an anger problem! You need to deal with that.” “You just have to spank until their crying changes to a submissive cry.” “I think he has a demon. He’s just so crazy wild.”

We didn’t have a lot of time or resources for therapy, or even the initiative to seek it out. Paul was a much better parent than I was, but I was the one with the children all the time.

Thankfully, things slowly got better, and by the time the last of the six came along, parenting was different. I had let go of some of the shame and terror, and was better able to relax and enjoy my children.

The “breaking their will” idea presumes the complete dominion of the parent, like a slave master over a slave, or a conquering king over his defeated subjects.

In the Pride and Prejudice series from the 1990s, the best version ever made, Mrs. Long is talking to Mrs. Bennett about everything Mr. Wickham had been up to. Since I don’t want to watch all five hours to get the quote right*, here’s what I recall: “Intrigues! Seductions! Drunken routs, in which more things were broken than pots and heads!”

*I mean, I do, but you know what I mean.

When you go about breaking the will, more things are broken than pots, heads, and wills. Worthiness, hope, relationships, a sense of safety, love.

How much better for parents and children to have a sense of being with and for each other. Yes, the parents are the responsible adults, and this isn’t to say they need to be the buddies, watching indulgently as a toddler pokes at your cat’s eyes or endlessly playing whatever the 4-year-old demands. But they can convey a sense of being in the same family and on the same team. “We all want to make this work. We want good things for each other.”

With my younger children, I realized that much of what I thought was that ominous bread dough rising (the Sinful Nature!) was just kids being kids. This is what children do. Usually they need a hug, a peanut butter sandwich, and a nap instead of another lecture or spanking.

Most kids want to do what’s right and appropriate, if only because they want people to like them. You can give them basic information about behavior and consequences without shaming them down to their souls.

“It’s not ok to kick the dog. It hurts him.”

--Kick—

“Let’s go inside. Unfortunately, if you kick the dog you can’t play outside today. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Once I realized how ridiculous, fear-based, and even abusive my methods had been, everything improved. I liked my children. They liked me. We cared for each other. They wanted to please me. Things were never perfect, but perfect isn't the goal. Caring for each other is the goal, and safety, competence, and all that.

My grownup kids have forgiven me and given the refreshing drink of grace. I am so grateful. I still pray for God to heal whatever I damaged.

You don’t have to freak out, dominate, and control. You can be the parent and guide them to adulthood with the loving authority of Jesus.

Your family will have its own personality, flavor, and priorities, and that’s ok. If you hear or read parenting advice that smells of shame, abuse, and fear, you are allowed to ignore it.

Pursue your own healing and being like Jesus, because your children are going to be a lot like you.

That’s what I think. I wish you well.

Aunt Dorcas

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Photo by Sophie Carlson. [Designed and sent of her own volition--how sweet of her!]

Check out my books at Muddy Creek Press.