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Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Vigor Magazine, which is now associated with Nauvoo.com. Stay tuned for the conclusion – How to Civilize a Child.
Why do they put rough, scratchy carpet on the walls in new chapels? To torture bare arms that rub up against it? To keep people from leaning against the wall and dozing? To allow the custodian to vacuum the walls?
I suspect they put it there to muffle the noise.
We’ve all been in sacrament meetings where one child begins hooting during the prayer, to be joined by others screeching, howling, and jabbering during every lull in the meeting. Passing the sacrament, a quiet passage of a musical performance, a crucial pause in the climactic moment of a talk – little children have an inborn understanding of exactly the right moment to let loose with a piercing wail or the banging of a metal toy against the bench.
No wonder the builders of our meetinghouses put carpets wherever they possibly can. It keeps the chapel from sounding like the monkey house at a zoo. (It also kills the vital resonance of a choir or musical instrument, but that’s another essay.)
And it’s not just the babies who work to defeat the reverence of our sacred occasions. We’ve all been at meetings where, among a group of teenagers seated on the stand, there are at least one or two who can’t keep from poking and joking, visually distracting the whole congregation from the speaker and making a mockery of the whole proceeding. Not to mention the inevitable clumps of teenagers out in the foyer, showing their contempt for the meeting by refusing to attend it.
In fact, the foyers often tell us more about our sacrament meetings than the noise inside. Loudspeakers attempt to allow people in the foyer to hear the meeting, but to no avail. Between the teenagers laughing, the little children playing and running around, the older children scurrying to and from the bathrooms and drinking fountains, and the adults chatting loudly about subjects having nothing to do with the sacrament meeting, it is often impossible to make out the words of the speaker.
And if you dare to raise your voice and ask people to pipe down so you can hear the meeting, you are met with glares and resentful comments as people either leave the foyer or, more often, talk a little more softly for a few moments before quickly resuming the previous noise level.
For the adults, teenagers, and older children in the foyer, I refer you to the standard talk on reverence and courtesy that you’ve heard and ignored a thousand times. You are beyond help, unless you choose to help yourselves.
But the noisy little children, whose cacophony disrupts the meeting until they are taken outside to run around and screech in the foyer, are not to blame for their behavior: Their parents are training them to do it by rewarding them for it, thus guaranteeing a new crop of unruly teenagers and discourteous adults in the foyers of the future.
Schoolteachers, employers, health providers, and law enforcement officials are already dealing with the achievements of such parents in the past.
Raising Barbarians
Parents who train their children to have contempt for sacrament meeting are training them to be uncivilized throughout their lives – to be discourteous, easily distracted, inattentive, careless, selfish, unhappy, and generally lacking in the skills needed to earn the love and respect of other people.
Some children recover from such parental training in irreverence, but the later they come to the realization that they need these skills, the harder it is to acquire them and the less naturally they use them. It’s like learning a language: There’s a window of opportunity when the skill can be acquired almost effortlessly, with no memory of the process of learning it. But to learn it later, you have to overcome many unhelpful habits, and you are never as natural and fluent as those who have had the skill from infancy.
I mean it quite literally when I say that parents train their children to be irreverent. For children by nature can be both attentive and inattentive, obedient and disobedient, and – wittingly or not – parents choose which behavior to reinforce at different times.
We train our children, for instance, to watch television with great attentiveness. We buy or rent the most entertaining tapes, and frequently put them down in front of the television when we want to do something else without distraction. The children quickly learn that if they stay in front of the TV, Mom and Dad are happy with them, but if they keep coming into the room where a parent is talking or working, they’ll meet with impatience, rejection, even anger. On those rare occasions when parents watch TV with a child, they talk right over shows they’re not interested in – but if the show is interesting to the parents, they hush any child who tries to talk.
In sacrament meeting, a toddler is sometimes quiet and sometimes noisy. Not understanding the talks or the music (both skills are acquired later), the public events of the meeting quickly become boring, and the toddler’s attention wanders. Here is where the parental training begins.
All else being equal, the child will continue to do whatever gives him pleasure. No pleasure, however, is more important to the child than the thrill of making other people, especially adults, and most especially parents, take an interest in him.
If the parents ignore the child no matter what he does, then he’ll do his best to interest other people in his activities. It is not an accident that the child gravitates to the noisiest toy in the bag – the metal car that can be banged against the bench; the electronic toy that beeps and buzzes; the rattle; the toy that is in another child’s possession, so that taking it will make the other child scream. All of these draw a satisfying amount of attention from others, and if the child keeps it up long enough, eventually the parents themselves will take notice and reward the child.
And how is the child rewarded? The parents, unwilling to look like oafs in front of the other parents, will generally not punish the child there in sacrament meeting – certainly not with a punishment severe enough to discourage repeat performances. If the parent uses a punishment that causes physical pain, the toddler will, of course, cry – the parent quickly learns that such punishments compound the problem.
So parents, when they finally respond to the noise-making or fight-provoking toddler, usually give the reward direct or the reward deferred.
The reward direct is to find a new amusement for the toddler and engage in that activity with him. The crayons come out; the Cheerios are opened; the child is held and hugged. Mission accomplished: The parent is now devoting his or her entire attention to the child. And the child has learned: To get a parent to play with you in sacrament meeting, make noise or start a fight.
The reward deferred is a bit more complex. The child gets a glare or a lecture – parental attention but not fun. Or the child is deprived of the device that he is using to create the noise – the sibling he is provoking or the toy he is playing with. The child soon learns that this level of parental attention is unsatisfying. The fastest way to hasten the reward is to scream; the more creative way is to immediately find another noisemaking or fight-picking opportunity and set to work until the parents finally give in and provide you with:
The ultimate reward – The Foyer. The parent who is serious about raising a barbarian always ends up by providing the child with the best of all possible rewards: The parent physically removes the child from the sacrament meeting. What victory could be more complete? The child now has the parent’s undivided attention. The speakers and singers and sacrament servers are all gone. In their place, the child is in an environment surrounded by chatting adults, boisterous teenagers, older children running to and fro, and fellow toddlers playing together as their parents watch glumly (or join in the chat). Thus the child has succeeded in getting complete control of the situation.
In some cases, the parent is angry and punishes the child in the foyer. This is not pleasant for the parent or the child. But the punishment causes the child to cry, and then the parent will comfort the child, and there will be hugging. In the meantime, there will be other children to watch, and even with the anger and pain, there is still the undivided attention of the adult. And since the adult is embarrassed by the whole situation, it is likely the adult will remain outside the sacrament meeting as long as possible. Indeed, the more unpleasant the child has been inside the sacrament meeting, the less likely the adult is to want to return to the meeting and resume the struggle. Ergo: The fun in the foyer lasts far longer than the punishment.
It is hardly surprising that children learn to make noise and provoke fights in sacrament meeting, when parents so carefully teach them that if they make a noise that is loud, annoying, or persistent enough, the parent will reward them.
Parents who try to make the problem go away by ignoring their children’s noise find that the opposite occurs: The children become even more disruptive. This is because noise in church meetings is not the same thing as a tantrum, which is best ignored. For in a church meeting, the child has allies in his project: The adults who begin to glare and then make pointed comments to or about the parents who are ignoring the disruptive child.
The parent cannot keep ignoring the child forever without losing the fellowship of the other ward members. So eventually the child will win, one way or another. After all, if the parent, offended by the criticism of others, goes inactive, the child’s victory is absolute.
Most important, the disruptive skills the child has been trained in can apply in so many other situations, school being the most important. All those techniques the parents rewarded will now be tried out on the teacher, with similar effect, for the child soon learns that enough disruption gets him special attention, often including extra visits from Mom and Dad. By the time the child learns that these disruptive techniques are ruining his life, it is too late – at best the child is now undereducated; at worst he is committed to friends and patterns of life that lead to great unhappiness.
The Skills of Civilization
Teachers in public schools in Mormon country can affirm what I’m asserting here: An astonishing number of Mormon schoolchildren come to kindergarten and all the later grades with great skill at disruption and distraction, and a desperate need to be entertained at all costs, while they are almost utterly lacking in the opposite skills – the ability to pay attention to something that is not, at first, entertaining, and the ability to ignore his own impulses and needs for extended periods of time, thus helping maintain a classroom in which everyone has a chance to learn.
For just as bad as the training in disruption that these children have received is the utter lack of training in those vital skills on which civilization depends: Delay of gratification, resistance to temptation, and the ability and willingness to cooperate with others in achieving a purpose that is not yet understood.
Think of all the activities we engage in that require or create public order – forming lines and taking turns; remaining courteously quiet in a public gathering so speakers or a movie or a play or a musical performance can be received by the audience; obeying traffic regulations even when nobody is there to catch you breaking them; playing and working with people who have different ideas and desires from you.
Window of Opportunity
Parents who are raising barbarians generally think of sacrament meeting as an hour of hellish torment, for it seems to them that everything they do with their toddlers backfires and makes things worse.
The truth is that bringing a toddler to sacrament meeting is one of the most valuable, even crucial, passages in the process of raising a civilized child.
For that is the responsibility every parent owes to the public at large: To produce civilized children, who not only refrain from disrupting public order but also actively create and maintain it. It is not easy, but the rules are relatively simple and the process with most toddlers is completed within a few months. Only minimal maintenance is required in later years, and the child will have no memory of any unpleasantness involved in the learning process.
This window of opportunity is only open for a few years. The window opens as soon as the child can understand some language, which is long before the child can speak fluently. Usually the window is fully open by age two, but many children can begin at one year or eighteen months. By the time a child is three or four years old, the window is closed, and then these skills can only be acquired through great effort and struggle, all of which will be remembered by the child, often with resentment.
I suspect many parents train barbarians because they don’t realize how smart and teachable their toddlers are. Because they think their children are too young to learn reverence, they end up inadvertently teaching them irreverence.
Other parents, however, don’t teach their children to be civilized because they have some half-baked notion that it’s bad to stifle a child’s natural exuberance. If you tried to keep children from ever playing or making noise, then you would indeed harm them. But when you use sacrament meeting as the occasion to begin civilizing your toddler, you are requiring of the child only that he control those natural impulses for a little over an hour, one day a week.
It is true that the child will probably be angry and frustrated during the early stages of teaching. Tears will be shed. And the parent will have to be – dare I say it? – pitiless. That is, you will feel pity. Indeed, your compassion for your child will tempt you to give in when those tears are shed.
But you can’t teach self-discipline to your child unless you have learned it yourself. You have to be the mature one, able to recognize that acquiring valuable skills is hard, and learning can be painful, frustrating, and infuriating. As God in his wisdom has shown us, when you love your children you don’t shield them from every tear; instead you do your best to make sure that the tears all lead to learning.
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