Episode 284: Balancing Parent-Child Relationships

One of the distinctives of the Charlotte Mason Method is that it is relational education. The Method also applies to all of life, and so we start with the foundational relationship in our students' lives: their relationship with their parents. In this episode of the podcast, we look at the two extremes, and learn from Charlotte Mason how to strike a balance that leads to life--for both parent and child.

School Education, Volume 3 of the Home Education Series by Charlotte M. Mason, chapters 1-3

"...it is far easier to govern from a height, as it were, than from the intimacy of close personal contact. But you cannot be quite frank and easy with beings who are obviously of a higher and of another order than yourself." (3/4)

"Parents and teachers, because their subjects are so docile and so feeble, are tempted more than others to the arbitrary temper..." (3/11)

"Autocracy is defined as independent or self-derived power...Autocracy has ever a drastic penal code, whether in the kingdom, the school, or the family. It has, too, many commandments. 'Thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not' ... The tendency to assume self-derived power is common to us all, even the meekest of us, and calls for special watchfulness; the more so, because it shows itself fully as often in remitting duties and in granting indulgences as in inflicting punishments." (3/15-16)

"Locke promulgated the doctrine of the infallible reason. That doctrine accepted, individual reason becomes the ultimate authority, and every man is free to do that which is right in his own eyes...the principle of the infallible reason is directly antagonistic to the idea of authority." (3/5-6)

"[B]ut wise parents steer a middle course. They are careful to form habits upon which the routine of life runs easily, and, when the exceptional event requires a new regulation, they may make casual mention of their reasons for having so and so done ; or, if this is not convenient and the case is a trying one, they give the children the reason for all obedience-"for this is right." In a word, authority avoids, so far as may be, giving cause of offence." (3/22)

"[A]uthority is vested in the office and not in the person; that the moment it is treated as a personal attribute it is forfeited. We know that a person in authority is a person authorised ; and that he who is authorised is under authority." (3/12)

"Authority is neither harsh nor indulgent. She is gentle and easy to be entreated in all matters immaterial, just because she is immovable in matters of real importance; for these, there is always a fixed principle. It does not, for example, rest with parents and teachers to dally with questions affecting either the health or the duty of their children. They have no authority to allow children in indulgences... Authority is alert; she knows all that is going on and is aware of tendencies...It sometimes happens that children, and not their parents, have right on their side: a claim may be made or an injunction resisted, and the children are in opposition to parent or teacher. It is well for the latter to get the habit of swiftly and imperceptibly reviewing the situation; possibly, the children may be in the right, and the parent may gather up his wits in time to yield the point graciously and send the little rebels away in a glow of love and loyalty." (3/17)

"Authority is that aspect of love which parents present to their children; parents know it is love, because to them it means continual self-denial, self-repression, self-sacrifice: children recognise it as love, because to them it means quiet rest and gaiety of heart." (3/24)

"The constraining power should be present, but passive, so that the child may not feel himself hemmed in without choice. That free-will of man, which has for ages exercised faithful souls who would prefer to be compelled into all righteousness and obedience, is after all a pattern for parents. The child who is good