If you want to talk "personality," we could have a whole conversation about costume-party costumes. This one was a 1920s-themed party for the 2020 New Year. The snarky costume turned out to be scarily prescient.
I'm not sure about this, but in Principle 4 I tend to read "personhood" for "personality." I think that's more what Charlotte Mason means, rather than something like "idiosyncrasy." I don't think she means "your child gets to obey you according to his personality," or "you must customize your authority to accommodate your child's personality," though to some extent we all do this. There are naturally thicker-skinned kids, and there are children who naturally melt into a puddle of insecurity and self-loathing if you look at them funny. Any remotely sensitive parent is going to take these things into account when dealing with a given child. BUT I don't really think that's the kind of thing Charlotte Mason is talking about here.
She tends to deal more in universals. That doesn't mean, incidentally, that she fails to understand that in a family there are many temperaments, or that each child is unique. You don't have to be a parent yourself to know these things; basically you just have to be sentient, which Charlotte Mason certainly was. She also certainly saw enough children in the course of her life to be aware of their variety and the challenges which that variety presents. It's tempting, as a parent, to write off her observations and ideas because she herself was not a parent. It's easy to tell yourself she's not talking to you, because she has never met your child.
But really, that's not the point at all. The point is that it is much more useful to many more people to talk about what is universal among children, what is simply true about the human species at a particular stage of development. If you can acknowledge a set of truths, then you are that much more at liberty to move among those truths and see how they manifest themselves in the individuality of your children. Writing about your particular children, on the other hand, is likely to be helpful only to other people who happen to have children just like yours – which is to say, have fun writing to yourself.
So: let's say that we've established that what we're not talking about here is individual personality, but something more like universal personhood, which is the province of all children. Let's also remind ourselves that we are picking up in the middle of a sentence that began in Principle 3, establishing that the principles of both (parental) authority and (child) obedience are "natural, necessary, and fundamental; but –" The "but," as we noted last time, is important, and now we're going to pick up with what it points to, the contrary rejoinder to the way the sentence began.
Here is Principle 4 in full:
We've already said that we might understand "personality" as "personhood." Already, again, we're in the territory of Catholic vocabulary, though of course Charlotte Mason doesn't mean to go there. It's just that when you're dealing with something true, Catholic is where you go. I read "limited by the respect due the personality of children" to mean something like this:
Our notion of our own authority, and of our children's duty to obey our authority, cannot offend against the intrinsic human dignity of those children.
Simply put, as people in authority, we're prohibited from using that authority in ways that dehumanize our children.
Nothing about this Principle, especially as an extension of Principle 3, negates what the Catechism of the Catholic Church sets out as the duties and responsibilities of children and parents. In Principle 3, Charlotte Mason has been rightly careful to endorse the traditional Christian understanding of the family as a hierarchy of authority, even as the Church is. Implicit in that understanding, however, is the assumption that every member of the family, parents and children alike, is a human being. Our children are not our possessions. They are not products of our home environment. We don't make them. God has made them, albeit through us – and they are. In our responsibility to educate and discipline our children, we can't lose sight of that fact. They are human beings. They are.
The next bit is where, I think, Principle 4 becomes concretely helpful in demonstrating what not to do, in the guise of our parental authority. Charlotte Mason sets out some basic parameters for treating your child – as, in a functional relationship, you would want to treat anyone – as a human being. Basically what she does here is to identify a set of what we would now call toxic behaviors, and to say, "Don't exert control over your child this way."
What way? She says:
Some of the items in this list are more obvious than others. I hope and pray that already you would not dream of eliciting obedience from your children through fear, as in their fear of you. Sure, you could choose to be scary, and have children who are actively afraid to step out of line. If I were you, having made this parenting choice, I might consider right now what my old age is going to look like, and whether obedience in the moment is worth a lifelong fear-based relationship. What do people do when they're afraid? They run away, that's what. They run away from the thing they fear; they run away from anything associated with the thing they fear. That's just the basic hardwired human instinct for survival and self-protection. It is, in fact, a God-given part of our nature. But like anything else God-given, you can abuse it, and when you do, that's when things go wrong.
If your children fear you when they are children, then all the injunctions in the catechism, or indeed in the world, may not be enough to make them want to come near you once they have a choice. Authority rooted in fear – in threats and punishments – is the kind of authority that seems designed to set children up to fail at their own responsibilities with regard to the fourth commandment. It's a lot harder to honor someone when you feel alienated from them. When Saint Paul exhorts parents not to provoke their children . . . well. It seems to me that obedience in the moment is not worth a lifetime of struggle to come close to observing a Commandment of God, and that setting your child up to have a hard time not sinning against you is hardly the way to gain a crown.
So for heaven's sake, yes, it's your job to discipline your child, but fear is not the way to form them for a life of discipleship.
So for heaven's sake, yes, it's your job to discipline your child, but fear is not the way to form them for a life of discipleship.
UPDATE: I would venture to say, too, that fear-based, authoritarian parenting is not a good way to ensure that children will grow up to practice your faith. Again, people who are afraid run away. They run away from the thing they're afraid of; they run away from anything associated with the thing they fear. Surely you can see where I'm going with this.
But what about love, you might ask. What does THAT mean, "fear or love?"
Well, it was hard not to go ahead and write this in the paragraph above, but: one way that parents instill fear in their children is to threaten to withhold love from them. They might not do it explicitly. But children know: if I'm not good, then they won't love me. You can't use your love as a tool to elicit desired results from your child. That is not what love is for. That is not how God loves us. He doesn't only love us when we've just come from Confession, all squeaky-clean. He loves us when we're going in, too. That's why He cares that we do go in. If we don't go in at all, His love for us doesn't cease; we just don't get to know it as much, that's all. We're the ones who change, not God. God is never not love. As parents, we are not allowed not to love our children in the way that God loves us. We're not allowed to use our love as a weapon to sandblast their behavior into a desired shape. That, friends, would be a sin, and if we're aware of doing it, we need to confess it as an offense against charity.
So again, it's your job to love your child. It's also your job not to weaponize that love.
Another thought about love and fear:
It's also possible to exert undue control over our children through our loving fear for them, through micromanagement which prevents their ever doing or exploring things for themselves. We can, sadly, love them so much that we want to keep them in a velvet-lined box forever, like a diamond ring we're afraid to wear. There's natural and reasonable protection, appropriate to a child's age and stage, and that of course is our responsibility. On the other hand, there's a kind of hyper-charged parental imagination that can begin to interpret the entire world and everything in it as a direct threat to a child's wellbeing. One of my children, growing up, had a friend whose first experience in plugging in an electrical appliance happened at our house, when that child was twelve. Plugging in the toaster honestly did not occur to me as a problematic or inordinately risky thing to ask the middle-school-aged child standing nearest the toaster to do . . . Of course, it didn't help that the toaster plug was faulty and that when the child did plug it in, flames spurted out of the wall. Our house: always the exciting place to be. At least after that, any other plugging-in experience was bound to seem awfully safe and dull by comparison.
It's really hard not to visit our phobias, whatever they are, on our children – because of course we love our children. We don't want bad things to happen to them. No parent wishes to court danger, and the thought of injury to, or worse, loss of, a child is of course unbearable. It should be unbearable. But when we allow our own fears, whatever they are, to shape our parenting, and to be the basis on which we draw boundaries for our children, then I think we are doing them exactly zero favors in terms of healthy growth and character development.
So it seems to me that another element which this principle might touch on is that anxious, fearful form of love that is always snatching the child back out of perceived, rather than real, dangers. And it seems to me that the offense to the child's personhood inherent in this kind of parenting is this: that it makes an idol of the child. The child becomes a precious thing to be protected and hoarded at all costs, not a person, with a measure of reason and common sense, even if immature, and with a need to explore, take some reasonable risks, and make some reasonable messes, in the course of his learning.
Incidentally, if any of this comes hard, because your own upbringing was shaped by fear or manipulative love patterns, then for heaven's sake, get help. Get help NOW. There are good Catholic family therapists waiting to help you, but honestly, a secular therapist covered by your insurance can aid you in working through the negative patterns of the past, so that you don't perpetuate them in the lives of your children. This is particularly true if your past involves trauma of any kind. EMDR, among other things, is a promising brain-re-mapping therapy. Anyway, don't live with that stuff. Don't make your children live with that stuff. Do something about it. You and they will be happier if you do.
Okay, so the rest of Principle 4 . . .
Basically, this principle is all about not manipulating people, because manipulation is dehumanizing. It's about not wheedling, cajoling, making deals, bribing . . . because honestly, to be offered a bribe is insulting. It's insulting to have someone else assume that of COURSE you won't do the thing you're supposed to do, that you are the kind of person who has to have the way greased for them. If it would be insulting to you, then why would it not be insulting to your children?
Now, being children and less mature, they might kind of like being bribed, because raise your hand, who doesn't like a treat? And yes, they resist doing things they don't want to do, and what are you gonna do about that?
Well, actually, there are many things you might do that don't involve systems of rewards and punishments, which really do amount to manipulation to achieve results. Ensuring that the nature and amount of work you're offering isn't either overwhelmingly difficult or stultifyingly meaningless is one way. Reducing amounts of unpleasant items on your to-do list – say, two subtraction problems today, instead of the whole page – so that you catch the child in motivating success rather than de-motivating failure, is another way. Addressing underlying issues, such as struggles with executive function, is yet another way.
So the bottom line is this: Principle 3 establishes that yes, in fact, as a parent, you do have authority, and yes, your children are enjoined to obey you, BUT – the crucial but – not at the cost of their personhood, their intrinsic dignity.
So the bottom line is this: Principle 3 establishes that yes, in fact, as a parent, you do have authority, and yes, your children are enjoined to obey you, BUT – the crucial but – not at the cost of their personhood, their intrinsic dignity.
What this means in practical terms for you is something you will have to work out. You are the person you are. Your children are the people they are. There is no one-size-fits-all look for this sacred hierarchy in your house; still, the basic truth is there for you to live.