Self-Control
Two-year-old Johnny was sitting in his mother’s lap at the kitchen table. He reached for a dish of steamed squash, but his mother pulled him back and said "No." He twisted his shoulders back and forth as if to break her grasp, and then he defiantly slapped the table with the palm of his hand.
Two-year-old Johnny was sitting in his mother’s lap at the kitchen table. He reached for a dish of steamed squash, but his mother pulled him back and said "No." He twisted his shoulders back and forth as if to break her grasp, and then he defiantly slapped the table with the palm of his hand. His face expressed anger. He made grunting noises that were clearly designed to imitate an angry bear. He highly resented his mother limiting his powers of indulgence. He wanted to indulge his sense of touch, smell, taste, and sight, along with the human drive to manipulate. And finally, he wanted to indulge in controlling his environment and those in it. This mentality of ‘give it to me now’ has been developing since the day he was born. He has now had two years to accept it as a way of life. His parents are wondering if they should start training him to exercise self-control. However, they are two years overdue.
Parents are responsible to impart values and self-control to their children, but there is a dilemma. The infant has fully developed fleshly desires and habits of indulgence long before his mental faculties have developed to the level where he can understand the need to exercise self-control. When a child gets old enough to begin to develop a will to exercise self-control (possibly around three or four) his flesh is already well practiced in the dark arts of indulgence. His flesh will get a three or four year headstart on the development of his sense of duty. He is born with a wanter but no stopper – with a gas peddle but no brake. At age three or four he will already be a confirmed ‘pleasure junkie’, a ‘do as I please rebel’, an ‘if it feels good do it hippie’, a ‘nobody tells me what to do politician’, a spoiled brat. With intemperate habits already well formed, he is not going to appreciate the call of his newly developing conscience toward self-restraint. Nor will he appreciate anyone else trying to impose limitations on his addiction to indulgence.
In the extraordinary ignorance of modern psychology we are told that the child should be left to his own free expressions, that we must be careful not to suppress his personality. What will you do when his free expressions are antisocial, when his behavior is disgusting and embarrassing? Will you call it modern art, and appreciate it for its original departure from the prudent? To allow ‘free expression’ is to allow the child the freedom to be in bondage to appetite and carnal desire. We would no more allow a child the freedom to wander and explore the bounds of his drives and passions than we would allow him the freedom to wander in traffic. If you lovingly provide everything a child needs, but fail to cross his will with enforced boundaries, you will by default produce a self-centered, carnally minded, emotionally disturbed, and, at the best, an average member of the group hanging out at the mall.
