Even if it is a challenge, the experience of rearing a family should be a happy one. Thoughtful parents who are students of Christian Science will recognize from the moment an infant joins the family that it is a responsibility for as long as it needs care and guidance and that the ability to guide and care faithfully for the child comes from their understanding of God's parenthood.
This understanding enables parents to separate their children from the beliefs associated with environment and heredity. They learn that a child is good because it is the reflection of God, good. They also learn that a child appears to be bad only because of a mistaken belief that God is not the only cause and creator.
How does Christian Science help the parent to raise a family wisely and harmoniously? Mrs. Eddy states in Science and Health (p. 336), "God is the parent Mind, and man is God's spiritual offspring." On this truth we can build safely, for it applies to parent and child alike. Accepting it, we see that children do not have minds of their own with which to delight or to torment their parents.
Holding to this basic fact of God's parenthood does not preclude the necessity of dealing firmly with the suggestions that while the children can be charming, good, and intelligent, they can also be unruly, difficult, and dull. Whatever is unlike the image of Love in the picture the parents hold of their children calls for honest and humble searching of their own thinking, as well as for the disciplining of any thoughts which do not measure up to the Christlike grace which is man's natural inheritance.
It is difficult to train a child to think and act honestly if the parents are less than honest in all their dealings. It is difficult to teach children to respect and consider the points of view of others when the parents are intolerant, self-opinionated, and quarrelsome. Having admitted the need to turn all that is unlovely out of their own thinking, parents see that really to love their children, they must train and teach them to guard their own mental homes from unlovely intruders.
No teacher would allow her pupils to continue making mistakes because she preferred not to upset or discourage them. She knows that to allow a pupil to persist in stating that twice times two equals five would make him unable to solve the elementary problems of arithmetic. As often as a mistake is made, it must be corrected; otherwise progress is impossible.
Similarly, thoughtful parents realize that discipline, as well as correction, is the most loving way of ensuring the harmonious unfoldment and progress of their children. Either through suffering the annoyance, discomfort, and discord resulting from mistaken views of ourselves or through the intelligent watchfulness of every thought and bringing it into line with the Christ shall we find that discipline will be necessary for us all. And this must continue until the last mortal concept has been corrected, and we, like Jacob, see ourselves and our children as though we had seen God's face (see Gen. 33:10).
We know that Christ Jesus, the most loving man to live on earth, was stern on occasions even with his disciples, rebuking them when necessary. In his great Sermon on the Mount he emphasized that one needs to come to terms with his adversary (see Matt. 5:25), warning that failure to do so will bring imprisonment and punishment.
Mrs. Eddy recognized the need for discipline, and in the Manual of The Mother Church provides Rules for human behavior which entail the disciplining of mortal mind.
Alert parents will know that it is not the real child, the offspring of the forever and only Mind, who is in need of correction but the mortal concept, which needs to be corrected in the thought of the parents and in that of the child.
We do not need to fear the consequences of discipline when it is based on the love which longs to see our children free from the bondage of mistakes—the mistaken concepts of their true selfhood. True discipline is not enforced to satisfy a human code of right and wrong, of good and bad; it is to guide the child into the way of pleasing God.
When parents base their training on the desire to have the children please God rather than themselves and their neighbors, they understand the necessity for wise discipline and correction of anything which would claim to defile the pure image of Love. They do not fear to lose the affection of their children because of the discipline which they find it necessary to impose in order to teach obedience to the law of Love.
In Ecclesiastes we read,"Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil" (8:11). We find the positive method for preventing the sons of men from being set in evil ways in the following terse advice from Proverbs (22:6): "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
Parents who love unselfishly draw upon the wisdom they know to be theirs by reflection, training their children under God's guidance. To appear to go deliberately against the whims and wishes of their children requires of parents moral courage and a deep conviction that by doing so they are promoting the child's happy progress. In "Miscellaneous Writings," our Leader says (p. 127), "Ofttimes the rod is His means of grace; then it must be ours,—we cannot avoid wielding it if we reflect Him."
Mrs. Eddy replies to a question on the way to govern a child as follows: "If you make clear to the child's thought the right motives for action, and cause him to love them, they will lead him aright: if you educate him to love God, good, and obey the Golden Rule, he will love and obey you without your having to resort to corporeal punishment" (ibid., p. 51).
This advice lays upon those who have the task of training children the need to set such an example in their own behavior that the child is willing to accept what they preach because they practice it. Until we can prove the perfection of God's creation in all our experience, there will be need for much discipline of our own thinking and of our children's thinking, for they too must be taught to see their parents as the beloved children of the one Father-Mother.
Seeing one another as children of God will make for comradeship, forbearance, and patience with correction, so that the way need not be hard for either parent or child, certainly not so hard as to take from family life the felicity, sweetness, and serenity which come from a trust that it is Love that wields the rod to guide us safely in the way.
