Ideas and Society

iStockphoto.com/Joanne Green

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Vigor Magazine, which is now associated with Nauvoo.com. To read part 1, click here.

The pattern I’m about to tell you works. I have never seen it fail. My wife and I have used it with four children who are amazingly good, loving, happy, righteous, creative, free-spirited, and patient – in short, civilized. We have also seen it used by friends and family members, with similar effects. The details of the process are infinitely adaptable; the fundamental principles must be followed without fail.

Set Clear Rules. You have to decide exactly what standard of behavior you are going to expect of a little child. Once you set these rules you are as bound by them as the children are. You must follow them yourselves.

Our family’s sacrament meeting rules for toddlers are fairly simple. Because sacrament meeting is a time that belongs to the whole congregation for the purpose of learning about and communing with the Lord:

1. No talking out loud.
2. No interaction with people on other benches.
3. The child never touches the floor.
4. Silent reading and drawing are the only permitted activities.
5. No food or drink during sacrament meeting, ever.
6. Partake of the sacrament.
7. Any activity that results in laughter or loud noise must stop immediately.
8. No hitting or hurting of anyone, by anyone.
9. Bathroom needs, diaper changes, and physical injuries are the only acceptable reason for leaving the meeting, and only long enough to solve the problem.
10. Willful violations of the rules result in removal from the meeting and confinement.

(Other families have tighter rules. I let my three-year-old daughter pull my beard and play with my tie, which other families might regard as disorderly or disrespectful behavior. I see such familiarities as a necessary counterpoint to my sternness when teaching her discipline. As long as she is not distracting other children or making noise, the particular rules are up to us.)

Confinement

Confinement can be viewed as a punishment, but if you do it properly it can be more positive than that. Traditional punishments – spanking, depriving the child of a toy or treat, and so on – are usually counterproductive. Since the point is to teach the child that sacrament meeting is a time for silence and stillness, it hardly makes sense to punish the child in ways that cause him or her to make more noise!

We do not resort to confinement at the first peep. Rather, we give one reminder, and take into account whether the infraction was willful or inadvertent. You must first make sure there are no physical causes for the child’s fitfulness. An uncomfortable diaper, an earache, an upset stomach, or the beginning of a fever can cause disruptive behavior, and the solution is not discipline.

Tolerance must include more than physical distress, I believe. A child can’t help laughing at something funny – so you remind him (and any accomplices) to stop the activity that resulted in laughter. A child falling off the bench is inadvertent – but the same child slowly sliding off the bench while watching you for a reaction, even after one reminder, is testing your discipline, and you must not fail him. When a child is clearly determined to break a rule, confinement must begin immediately, so the child can clearly understand exactly what he did to cause you to confine him.

Since confinement will only be used with toddlers, you can still hold the child easily in your arms, and overpower all attempts at resistance. The process begins at the bench in sacrament meeting – but you never attempt to stay in the meeting during the confinement. Instead, you scoop the child up and leave for the foyer immediately. This usually silences the child for the duration of the trip to the foyer.

The moment you reach the foyer, however, you must follow an unvarying pattern:

1. Hold the child firmly in your arms (but not so tightly as to hurt).
2. Hold him in front of you so that he is looking into your eyes. Don’t hold him at your shoulder, like a burping baby, or he’ll kick you mercilessly. And never hold him on your lap so he is looking away from you, toward all the pleasing distractions of the foyer.
3. His arms must not be free, and any limbs that he is flailing about must be made immobile. It is essential that you achieve this through persistence, not through pain. That is, don’t grip him so tightly that he stops struggling because it hurts. Rather grip him firmly enough that he can’t get his limbs free, but whenever he stops struggling there is no pain or even discomfort. In fact, when he isn’t struggling, he finds that he is merely being held close to the warm body of his loving parent.
4. Your face is the only interesting thing that he can see, and what he sees in your face is not anger, but rather patience and love.
5. Talk to him quietly and incessantly, even if he is screaming and crying so loudly you can’t even hear your own voice. He can hear you, or at least feel the vibration of your voice through your chest and his own body, and the sound must be sweet and soothing.
6. Explain to him, in simple words, repeated over and over: “I know it’s hard to be quiet in sacrament meeting. But we have to be quiet so everyone can hear. As soon as you’re quiet and still we can go back inside. As soon as you’re quiet you can go back in and draw more trees. When you’re quiet we can go back in and read the Big Bird book. Oh, I know you’re so sad. Poor baby, you’re so frustrated. Be still, my sweet child, so we can go back inside and be happy.” And so on, and so on. Your voice must be loving and musical.
7. Sing quiet songs. Especially early in this process, the child does not understand what all your words mean, but he understands that being held and sung to is a sweet and happy experience. Alternate quiet songs with more of the simple conversation.
8. When the child is quiet enough to hear you, smile and continue talking, only now you start praising his stillness. “Look at you, you’re doing so well. Look at how quiet you are. That’s just right for sacrament meeting. Are you ready to go back inside?” Thus you reward, not the child’s disruption or tears, but his cooperation. And the ultimate reward is to return to the meeting.
9. Wait for genuine calm before going back into the meeting. The child may be silent, but if you can still sense resistance or franticness in his demeanor or his body movements, you must keep on soothing and quieting him.
10. Once you return to the meeting, the child may test you by immediately starting to cry again, or resuming the disruptive behavior, or starting a new disruptive behavior. Without rancor, scoop him back up and start over, never losing your temper or getting angry. The confinement experience must be identical every time.
    
11. If the child obeys the rules upon returning to the meeting, reward him by taking part in a permitted activity: Hold him (but not confiningly) if he wants, or let him play with your tie (if that is permitted under your rules), or turn the pages of his book with him. Or, if he wants to shun you for a while, accept that and allow him to assert his independence. Your goal is not to break his will, but rather to train him to willingly remain quiet in sacrament meeting.

Self-Discipline

This process is much harder for the parent than it is for the child. You have to school your own emotions, for it doesn’t do at all for you to become angry or impatient with the child – he must see and feel that your love and concern for him are real.

You also have to refuse to become distracted. The activities in the foyer can as easily distract you as the child. The worst interference comes from uncivilized adults, who think that because you’re in the foyer, it’s a great chance to chat. All you owe such adults is a brief, polite statement: “Excuse me, but I can’t talk right now.” If they persist in trying to talk to you, they are the ones being unbelievably rude, and you have no choice but to turn your back and walk away from them. If the other activities in the foyer are so distracting that you can’t keep your child focused on your face, then you have to leave – walk outside or down the hall to an empty classroom.

When singing, you must not sing playful songs, or confinement will become a game, and this must never happen. The goal of confinement is stillness, not laughter or fun.

Because the child will usually cry when confinement begins, it is easy for you to lose your original purpose – to help the child acquire the self-control to remain quiet in sacrament meeting – and get sidetracked onto a completely different purpose – getting the child to stop crying and act happy. The latter purpose will lead you to play with the child, and at that moment you have utterly failed. By making the foyer experience a game, the child has learned that at the cost of a brief period of tears, he then gets to play with his parent in the foyer. Your failure at this moment is complete.

Instead, you must remember that stillness is your goal, and if your child tries to play with you, you must refuse. “No, sweetheart, this isn’t playtime. We can play quietly in sacrament meeting, but we can’t play out here. Out here we have to be quiet so we can get ready to go back into the meeting.”

Ignore Criticism

There will no doubt be people in your ward who will see what you’re doing and criticize you for it. Or you will be so uncomfortable with your parental role that you will imagine they are criticizing you. After all, your child is crying, and you caused it. Therefore you must be a bad, abusive parent. Right?

Wrong.

You are not venting your rage. You are not inflicting pain (though the child’s struggles against your unyielding arms may cause pain). Your child is not receiving anything but loving guidance from you. Your child’s furious tears are the same tears he will shed someday no matter what. Better to shed those tears in your arms, as a toddler, than to shed them years later, when his inability to control himself has led him to grief.

It is exactly analogous to taking your toddler for his shots. He sees the needle. He fears the doctor because he’s been given injections before. You don’t lie to the child; you say, “It does hurt a little, but be brave. Here, I’m with you, I’m holding you, and even though it hurts, it will help you stay healthy and strong. Can you hold still and help the doctor do this?”

You take the child for the shot, and the child cries, and you caused it! But it is the parent who yields to his child’s weeping and does not get the injections who is the bad parent. The good parent is not afraid of his child’s necessary tears.

After all, we’re supposed to be the grown-ups. We’re supposed to do the right thing even when it hurts.

Fathers, This Is Your Job

I have been saying “parent” throughout, and when the father is not available, the mother can and indeed must go through this process. But when the father is present, this is his job, and not because of some arbitrary notion of patriarchal responsibility.

The fact is that children respond differently to fathers. I don’t know a mother who hasn’t had the frustrating experience of pleading, arguing, yelling, begging, threatening, even bribing to get a child to do something, only to have the father come in, speak once, and immediately get the obedience that the mother could not get no matter what she did.

The youngest infants respond differently to their father’s voice. They turn to their mother for comfort. What they crave from their father is judgment. They fear their father’s disapproval; they long for their father’s praise. This means that an ounce of discipline from the father can be more effective than pounds of it from the mother, though this varies from child to child.

Unless your work requires you to be away from home, it is vital that you be there for every sacrament meeting during this crucial time in each toddler’s life. Even if you are in the bishopric or are ward clerk and your calling normally would take you away from your family’s pew, explain what you are doing and sit with your family during that time – or, failing that, watch closely so that you can swoop down from the stand and scoop up your child when the need arises. It would take your wife far longer to accomplish the same task, and would probably cost her more emotionally than it will cost you.

What Children Get

Children are all different, and this process has been different for all four of our children. My first boy learned very quickly. A few trips to the foyer and he never had to be disciplined again for irreverence until he was eleven, at which time one quick reminder was all it took.

My first daughter, however, was stubborn. I think some people in our ward in South Bend, Indiana, must have thought I was inactive for about six months, since I spent every sacrament meeting in the foyer. Part of the problem, though, was my ineptitude – I had not yet learned the rule about keeping her facing me and talking to her kindly throughout. I suspect I would have succeeded far faster had she not been on my lap, facing all the distractions of the foyer instead of focusing on my voice and face.

Even so, she gradually learned that if she stayed still in sacrament meeting, she got loving, quiet attention from her parents and her older brother, and she, too, was fully able to stay quiet in sacrament meeting long before she turned three – so that the struggle is lost in the time before memory, and only the skill of self-control carried forward into her conscious life.

Our second son was afflicted with cerebral palsy, and we were unable to determine how well he understood us. He was also a happy child, and the few times he made noise we took him out but with no attempt at confinement. Not until he was about six years old did we begin to attempt to teach him stillness in sacrament meeting – and we paid the price of delay.

He was already too old to learn from confinement, and so we did not attempt it. Instead we took him to the foyer and explained the rules to him, emphasizing the need to allow others to hear the sermons. We did not play with him in the foyer, of course; and while it was an entertaining change of scenery, he knew we were displeased and gradually learned to keep silent in meetings except when he had a physical need. This moral choice was complete before he was baptized.

At the time this essay was originally written, our three oldest were nineteen, sixteen, and thirteen years old. But we also had a three-year-old, and I’m happy to report that she successfully completed her basic course in civilization – when she was two. By age three, she required an occasional lifted eyebrow or finger to the lips urging quiet, but she obeyed all the rules without complaint. She looked forward to going to church, and while it’s nursery that she was eager for, she was perfectly content to climb up into her place on the bench.

Not only that, but she was already learning to be genuinely aware of the meeting, watching for each step in the sacrament, reverently taking her own bread and cup. She bowed her head and folded her arms for the prayers, not because we made her do it, but because she wanted to be part of the meeting.

During the months of training her, my older children were bemused at the process. Did you do that with me? they asked. We told them all about what their training was like. And we realized that the skills they were seeing us teach the littlest were the very skills that had served them well in all their associations: The ability to be silent at will, to hold still and pay attention. The skills that teachers and bosses demand, that friends expect, that loved ones need. And along with that specific skill, the ability to delay gratification, to resist temptation, to foresee the consequences of their choices.

And another benefit: They never doubted that we loved them and cared what they did. That, too, came partly from those struggles over stillness in sacrament meeting.

Will this work with every child? Children with serious behavioral disorders are not going to respond to this – but such problems are rare and usually show up long before sacrament meeting reverence becomes an issue. For most toddlers this training process works – every bit as well as the more common practice of training little ones to behave disruptively.

Orderly Progress

The rules for toddlers, of course, are not the rules for older children. But the changes should not be arbitrary. In the family I grew up in, my parents set specific ages. Along with baptism at eight years old, for instance, we knew for years in advance that we would then be expected to fast one of the two meals on fast Sunday; by twelve, both meals.

Similarly, there was a set age at which books and toys had to be set aside during meetings, and because the transition was linked to our age, we would have been ashamed to continue doing something so clearly marked as “childish.”

Age-linked progression is at the heart of orderly life in the Church, and parents do their children and their neighbors no favor when they violate that order by not expecting their children to live up to those rules. (An obvious example is the rule against dating before age 16. When parents succumb to their children’s pleading for early exceptions, usually because their child is so “mature,” they harm the child by teaching contempt for good order and by promoting the idea that the child is too good for the rules; and they harm the entire community by making it that much harder for other parents to hold to the rule while maintaining peace at home.)

If compliance to rules of good order were perfect, those rules would not chafe. Children suffer only when they see other children not being bound by those rules.

There is no clearer example than the rule that children should sit with their families during sacrament meeting. If all parents would insist on this rule, the teenagers would all bear it pleasantly enough; only when many teenagers are free to wander the building or to sit in unruly clumps far from adult supervision does the burden of sitting with one’s family become shameful to the few teenagers whose parents are trying to help maintain order.

The rules don’t have to be insanely strict, of course. Once our children reached the age of twelve, we permitted them, if they asked, to sit with friends – but only if the friends were sitting with their own family, so that adult supervision and reverent attention to the meeting were assured. And they had to get permission each time, permission which was only granted if we knew that the family was one that made an effort to maintain reverence. (It must also be said that permission was never denied under this rule, because our children never asked to sit with a family that did not make the effort.)

Cooperation among Families

Training toddlers to be reverent is something each family can do entirely on its own, regardless of what the rest of the ward is doing. Of course our little ones hear the noise made by toddlers who are being trained to make noise in church, but at such moments we pat our little one affectionately and thank her (in a whisper) for being so quiet. “See how hard it is to hear the speaker with all that noise? But you never make noise like that. We’re so proud of you.”

Does this teach our children to look down on those who misbehave? I should hope so. It would be madness to think that we could teach virtues to children without also teaching them to hold the opposite of those virtues in low esteem. You cannot praise good behavior without, by implication, criticizing bad behavior. Of course we teach our children never to look down on someone for something he cannot help; and we teach them never to treat anyone badly or to talk someone down. But within our family we candidly discuss our own failings and the lapses of others, because only by recognizing error can we learn to avoid it.

I cannot imagine serious moral teaching without it. Jesus had no qualms about naming folly and hypocrisy when he saw them, even as he kindly and patiently embraced the repentant sinner. And so we have no qualms about thanking and praising our children for their obedience and their contribution to the good order of the community, often in pointed contrast to those who do not obey or contribute.

This is not to lift ourselves above others: We are just as quick to point out our own lapses and errors, as well as the lapses and errors of our children. A community that is afraid to name offenses is doomed to drown in them.

As children get older, however, parents are no longer their sole wellspring of approval. By the junior high years, children acquire enormous power over each other, and this power gravitates to the most arrogant and disdainful of the children. Parents find that their child is much more afraid of the contempt of a peer than of the disapproval of his parents.

It is at this point that it becomes vital for all the parents of a ward to be united in enforcing the rules of good order in the ward, or chaos results. The children whose parents fail to enforce the rules are cut adrift and unhappy, many of them pushing farther and farther away from the Church in the effort to find some point at which their parents care enough to draw a line. Meanwhile, and the children whose parents still try to enforce the rules suffer either from conflict with their parents or isolation from their peers.

Yet if every family, or all but one or two, insist that their teenagers sit with an orderly family in sacrament meeting and attend all their meetings, there will be no peer pressure and far less conflict over the matter. The kids can whine to each other all they want, but the result is that good order is maintained, the children know their parents care what they do, the teenagers have a chance of actually hearing and learning from sacrament meeting, the younger children see the example of the older children complying with the rules of reverence – and all this without rifts being created among the teenagers themselves.

Make no mistake about it: All parents who permit their teenagers to sit anywhere but with their families in sacrament meeting are committing an offense against every other family in the ward, and wards that are plagued by teenagers roaming the building during meetings should agree together to repent all at once, so that no one family is thrown into sharp conflict within the home. And this, too, would be a great help in the teaching of toddlers.

And you who complain about the lack of reverence in our meetings, make sure you aren’t part of the problem. How much whispering and note-passing do you do? Do you think the children don’t see? Do you wink and play with children on other benches? Do you let your children tempt other families’ kids to break their rules of reverence? Does your anger at noisy families introduce a spirit of contention and division in the ward? When you are out in the foyer, do you chat with other adults, thus making it impossible for you and harder for others to hear the meeting?

Instead of making it harder for each other, we should be making it easier. If a lone parent is struggling to deal with a group of unruly children, offer to help. “I’d be happy to sit with your other children if you need to take the little one out.” At the very least you can make sure that the unruly child who leans over the bench in front of you never sees you doing anything interesting, but rather sees your entire bench full of people looking toward the speaker, listening intently.

Every Mormon ward is a village, with all the drawbacks and all the advantages of village life. If all parents would establish clear rules for their children, and, by persuasion and longsuffering, labor to bring them into compliance with good rules of behavior, not only would our sacrament meetings no longer sound like zoos, but within a generation our foyers would be empty because everyone would be in the meeting.

Our children and each new generation of adults, blessed with skills of self-control learned young, would find themselves living in a world that was more civilized because Mormon parents, at least, were no longer raising barbarian children.