The Mother at Home - Discussion

THE MOTHER AT HOME

Here are some things I took from the reading this week.

Children must learn obedience. This means obeying immediately, with a good attitude, without always understanding the reason. We must pray with our children, instruct in religious truths and love them.

The author explains a story of a child who does not want to take medicine. The child has been raised to obey only when it makes sense. The child doesn’t like the taste of the medicine so the child doesn’t think it makes sense to take the medicine. (This book was written before medicine tasted better than candy.) The mother of this story has raised her children to “call the shots” so the mother doesn’t force the medicine on the child and eventually the child dies. This is an extreme example – or is it?

Let’s first look at this physically or temporally. A young child is running toward the road. The parent yells, “Stop!” A child trained in obedience will stop immediately – even though he had previously looked to see there were not any cars in the road. A child who is trained to only obey when it makes sense may keep running. There were no cars so why not run into the road? The child recons he will go get the ball and then see what Father was yelling for. Unfortunately when the child first looked for cars, the car coming down the road was at an angle that the child could not see it.

Now let’s make the analogy go further to the spiritual realm. There are several things we, as parents have learned in our lives – some were learned the hard way. We will instruct our children against making our same mistakes. Our children may not see the reasoning, but if they will obey, they will avoid sadness. Every command does not need to be explained beforehand. God doesn’t explain all of his commandments with reason. There are some things we are simply asked to obey, for obedience sake. Some people do not pay tithing because they don’t see the reason. Some don’t want to wait to date until they are 16 because they don’t see the reasoning behind waiting. Some don’t want to go to the temple because they don’t see the point of it. Some don’t think the mother should stay home with the children because they feel it isn’t right for them. Regardless of whether or not a person thinks a commandment is full of reason, it is still a commandment and we ought to obey. Teaching children in the home to obey the parent, with or without reason, helps them to learn to obey God, with or without reason.

Here is the bottom line. Obeying God’s commandments – ALL OF THEM – will bring us greater joy and less heartache than if we do the opposite. We want this not only for ourselves, but especially for our children. To assist our children in being obedient to God, we must teach them to be obedient in the home. The home is where we learn to have a relationship with God so therefore, we must teach complete obedience in the home.

In The Mother at Home it states “It is certainly the duty of parents to convince their children of the reasonableness and propriety of their requirements. This should be done to instruct them, and to make them acquainted with moral obligation. But there should always be authority sufficient to enforce prompt obedience, whether the child can see the reason of the requirement or not.”

We are asked to follow commandments. Some of them we understand the reasoning. Some of them we do not understand until later when the wisdom is shown unto us. This is what we also need to teach in the home. Reasoning is good. It prepares the children to act for themselves and to make wise decisions, but often – too often – blind obedience is lost in modern pop psychology. Sometimes, we need to obey just for the sake of obeying.

When the early saints were given the Word of Wisdom, it didn’t make sense to them. But through obedience and time, we are all seeing the wisdom of such a commandment.

How do you teach obedience? Well, we will all have to wait to find out. The next portion of the book deals with this.