Choice and Accountability

I’m a mother. Heavenly Father has blessed me with four amazing children. At first, this may seem a little off topic for my blog. But parents will understand how fundamentally liberty and parenthood are intertwined. Today, I want to share a few thoughts on the importance of teaching your children about freedom and its implications.

I like to say that I never “force” my children to do anything. I allow them to make their own choices and help them to understand that the consequences they face are a result of making bad or good choices. Once, I had another mother respond to this assertion rather angrily. She said, “Well, I’m not going to allow my son to hit his brother so that he can have freedom.” I can see how my parenting philosophy would initially seem very much like an absence of discipline. In hopes of helping other parents understand the importance of liberty, I want to explain this idea a little more.

There was a time, at my house, when I used to say “If you make good choices, good things happen” and, “If you make bad choices, bad things happen,” an awful lot. Now, I say, “If you make good choices…” and I’m immediately interrupted by at least one of my children responding, “Mommy, I already know that!” They have come to understand two very simple things: 1. They are free to make their own decisions and 2. The consequences of those decisions will follow naturally.

To those people who find this to be a disturbing lack of discipline, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I DID NOT GIVE THEM THEIR AGENCY. Ultimately, their ability to make decisions is a gift from God. The mother who objected to my methods cannot prevent her son from hitting his brother without tying him up or locking him in his room at all times as a preventative measure. Agency exists. As parents, we can handle its existence in one of two ways.

Here’s a scenario: Your older child sees the younger one with one of his toys. He walks over, takes the toy and pushes the other child down. You, now have two choices. You can fly off the handle, yell at the older child. Tell him that he can never, never hit his brother. In essence, you have just said with your actions and probably your words, “I will not allow you to do that.” Here, the child sees the parent restricting him. That makes the parent the “bad guy” in the child’s eyes.

There’s a second way to handle this fight. You can walk over to the older child and look at him, so he understands you’re trying to communicate something important. This may include taking him by the shoulders. Calmly, you say, “That is a bad choice. You made a bad choice by hitting your brother. When you make bad choices, bad things happen. Now you need to sit in time out.” Just by changing the wording a little bit, the choice becomes the “bad guy” and the punishment is a natural consequence, not mom being mean. When something like this happens, I put my child in time-out until he says he is ready to “make good choices” and then I explain that apologizing would be a good choice. If he refuses, I calmly explain, “That’s fine, that’s your choice. But you have to stay in time out until you are ready to make good choices.” My children get praised for apologizing. I tell them how proud I am of their good choices. This helps them see that good choices bring good things. It almost always works for my kids.

I further enforce it by immediately rewarding good behavior. For example, this morning, my son was playing his video game. I had told him that he had ten more minutes of play time before we got dressed for the day. My husband didn’t know about that and told my son to immediately clean his clothes up out of the bathroom. My son obeyed without complaint. When he returned, I explained to him that obeying his dad was a very good choice and I would start his 10 minutes of play time over because he had made a good decision.

We’ve been doing this for a long time. I always make sure my kids understand the consequences of their decisions and I always make certain they know that the choice to obey or disobey is theirs, but there will be a consequence (good or bad). Over time, tantrums have virtually disappeared. My children do sometimes disobey. But they are quicker to accept their punishment, because they do not feel they are being controlled. Their punishment was clearly explained to them when they chose to disobey. For example, there are never dessert tantrums anymore. My children may have dessert if they eat all their dinner. Otherwise, because they like sweets, they will fill up on them. We’ve reached the point where my son will stop eating in the middle of a meal. When he says he’s finished, I tell him “That’s okay, you should stop eating when you’re full. But, you won’t get dessert tonight because you can’t put sugar into your body when you haven’t eaten the good foods first.” For a while he would cry, but now he smiles and says, “Okay, mommy, I’m done.” The “punishment” is never a “punishment.” It’s a choice and he knows he’s in control.

So, why am I posting this on my blog which is concerned primarily with sharing the importance of liberty? It’s just this. So many of the people in this country seem to have never learned how choice and accountability work. They are like children who want to think of themselves as victims of circumstance, rather than dealing with the natural consequences of their actions. This feeling of being victimized is, in and of itself, a tyrant. And the ignorance that begets it is the ignorance of how natural consequences work. As I said earlier, I did not give my children agency. It exists because of our Heavenly Father. I didn’t invent the concept of good choices bringing good things and bad choices bringing bad. But I will help them to understand it. So, I want to say to every American: “When you make good choices, you are free; When you make bad choices, you enslave yourself.” It’s not just the children that need to come to understand this principle. There is no one holding you down or forcing you to live poorly. You will only be truly free when you choose to stop blaming and start acting.