Training Fleshy Flesh
Occasionally we receive criticism about our emphasis that parents should set up training sessions for their children. Our first book on child training, To Train Up A Child, contained an illustration of how we trained our children...
...not to touch guns by placing an unloaded and broken gun in the living room where the children could reach it.We carefully watched them. If they touched it, we spanked their hand with a little switch. One to three switchings was sufficient to prevent the little crawlers and toddlers from ever touching a gun.
"You shouldn’t tempt your children," we are told. I can understand how a wrong attitude on the part of the parent could turn this into a hostile entrapment, leaving the child feeling used. But this can only happen if the parent is hostile. If your intention is to train your child, not just seek opportunity to punish him, all will be well. Training sessions are not unordinary. All events in a child’s life are training. How many times a day do you have to tell a two-year-old "No"? That was a training session. The difference in a happenstance occurrence and one that you premeditate is that the planned "temptation" can be tailor-made and controlled so as to reap the greatest benefit in the shortest period of time with the least amount of effort, and the least stress on the child. The training session should be staged so as to be natural. The child will not know it is staged. In many cases, if the parent is sensitive, an unplanned event can be turned into a training session.
Often the circumstances that naturally arise are so varied and sporadic that the training is more difficult to communicate. If a child occasionally tears the pages out of a book left within his reach, it may be difficult to communicate your desire due to his failure to remember the previous rebuke. It may be confusing to him when he is suddenly disciplined for tearing the pages out of your favorite Bible. But if you place books on the table where he can access them at any time, and you then stand watch closely and prevent him from tearing the pages, the continual reinforcement over one or two days will train him not to tear pages. However if you allow him to tear up one kind of paper and not another it may be difficult for him to determine what is off limits and what is available for tearing.
You the trainer must arrange the environment so as to create the maximum effect in your training. Consistency is the key. You cannot allow a child to play with one set of car keys and not pick up other sets he finds lying around. If you want to be assured that he never plays with keys, you must make all keys off limits. This is not done by placing the keys beyond his reach, but by placing keys within his reach and then consistently denying him the pleasure of touching them. A child of any age can be easily trained to play in a room and touch half of the objects and not the other half. As a parent I am not prepared to spend the time it would take to enforce too broad a scope of continual temptation, but there are a few things like books, keys, guns, vases, dishes, etc. that must be placed off limits by leaving a test case within physical limits. If you trained a child not to touch books, and then placed all books out of reach, in time the discipline to not tear books would be forgotten. It is having an opportunity to tear and frequently exercising the will to not do so that confirms in the child the no-tear discipline. I stayed in the home of a grandpa who had trained his little crawling, eleven-month-old granddaughter to handle one shelf of books but not touch the other. She would also ignore the objects on the top of the coffee table but freely access the trinkets on the under side compartment. During the week I stayed with them, I never saw the grandparents rebuke or spank this child. She cheerfully obeyed. The interesting thing was that she was not so obedient when she was in her own home where the mother was lax in discipline and had not set up training sessions.
