Obedience Training

Eventually, every mother and father will decide what obedience looks like in their home. For some parents, obedience means a prompt response, unencumbered by protest or complaining. For other parents, obedience is a relative term, reflecting what they end up with after negotiating the terms of obedience. For these parents, repeating, threatening, or bribing to get some of what they asked for is just a way of life.

Here we can offer a bit of hopeful encouragement: It is possible to give your children instruction and receive an appropriate and courteous response—no murmuring, no complaining! However, this can only happen if obedience has value in Mom and Dad’s thinking. If obedience lacks instructive value in your head, we can assure you, it will lack responsive value in your child’s heart.

The purpose of obedience training is to help parents manage their child until the child acquires age-appropriate self-control to manage his or her own life. The process requires two parties: the parents, who provide instruction, guidance and correction; and the child, who responds to Mom and Dad’s leadership. But, obedience training starts with understanding the four priorities, which begin early in a child’s life.

Consider a basic four-tier pyramid. Each level rep-resents a different spectrum of training. While they are equally important in the overall scheme of parenting, their empha- sis parallels a child’s development and understanding. Let’s consider the uniqueness of each priority.

Tier One: Health and Safety

The top level of the pyramid represents health and safety concerns. By this we mean the strongest motive to train an eighteen to thirty-six month old starts with a primary concern for keeping the child safe. Toddlers are not old enough or wise enough to recognize the immediate consequences of their actions. They simply do not understand the practical meaning of “safe.” In moments of danger, when an obedient response from your toddler is necessary, parents do not have the luxury of time to beg, plead or bribe their child into submission. Thus, health and safety is at the top of our pyramid. While there will be plenty of general training opportunities during the day, most of them will not come with the same sense of urgency as health and safety.

Tier Two: General Parenting

The second level of the pyramid rep- resents general parenting. These are the everyday moments of training covering such things as “Come to Mommy”, “Pick up your toys” and “Leave the dog dish alone”. With toddlers, learning is a process that takes time and that means compliance does not always come easily or consistently. But as you gain ground at each level of “training priorities”, your efforts will ultimately reinforce the first tier of the pyramid, that being the health and safety needs of your toddler, where compliance is not negotiable.

Tier Three: Stewardship

By stewardship, we mean training a child to be respectful of the family’s house- hold possessions, their own toys and of course, the property of others. Yes, even toddlers can be taught how to respect items in your home — and elsewhere. But this skill level takes time to achieve and requires purposeful training.

Teaching your toddler good steward- ship habits actually aids the process of obe- dience training, because stewardship has a value or worth component attached. While toddlers are not capable of understanding the concept of value, they are capable of learning what ‘gentle’ means because ‘gen- tle’ can be taught concretely. You can show a toddler how to be gentle with the plant, gentle with his baby brother, or gentle with the little kitten.

Here we offer a word of caution. In the world of a mobile toddler, everything and anything in arm’s reach can become an item to explore or investigate. But no matter how cute the moment might be, if the item is not age-appropriate, or not the child’s toy, it should be placed in the ‘off limits’ category because not every new discovery can be rescued by Mom or Dad before it breaks. At the same time, you must avoid the temptation to rearrange your home just to avoid conflict in your training. Take advantage of daily opportu- nities to establish, through training, what items can be touched and what items are off-limits.

Is stewardship training a priority as important as health and safety? On the surface, it doesn’t seem to be because you can replace a pair of broken glasses but you can never replace your child. Yet, though health and safety provides a greater sense of urgency, staying mindful of this third tier is still very important because each tier is vital to the overall strength of the entire obedience pyramid.

Tier Four: The Moral Foundations

The moral tier represents the fourth level of the pyramid. Training at this level requires a child to have the capacity to assimilate and understand moral values and virtues. Young toddlers lack this capacity. Right now “me, myself and I” is the control- ling impulse, blocking the empathy side of a child’s perception of life. Although this is the case, parents must diligently work to establish right patterns of the heart even though the child may not fully understand the moral purpose behind Mommy and Daddy’s insistence.

Encouraging a toddler to be ‘kind’ should take place whether a child understands the virtue or not. This is because actions in young children precede beliefs, meaning a child should comply with an instruction given even if he doesn’t under- stand why he needs to. In adulthood the opposite is true. Our beliefs precede action. Adults rarely take action unless they see the value in doing so.

When it comes to the obedience pyramid 1) health and safety, 2) general parenting and 3) stewardship should be the main training priorities in training. The attention given to these three during this phase of training supports the fourth tier that will eventually become a training priority — reaching the heart of your child with virtues and values that will shape the rest of his life and all of his or her relationships.