Question: Isn’t it our goal to produce children with self-discipline and self-reliance? If so, how does your approach to external discipline imposed by parents get translated into internal control?

Answer: There are many authorities who suggest that parents take a passive approach to their children for the reason implied by your question: They want their kids to discipline themselves. But since young people lack the maturity to generate that self-control, they stumble through childhood without experiencing either internal or external discipline.

Thus, they enter adult life having never completed an unpleasant assignment or accepted an order that they disliked or yielded to the leadership of their elders. Can we expect such a person to exercise self-discipline in young adulthood? I think not. That individual doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.

My belief is that parents should introduce their children to discipline and self-control by any reasonable means available, including the use of external influences, when they are young. By being required to behave responsibly, he gains valuable experience in controlling his own impulses and resources. Then as he grows into the teen years, responsibility is transferred year by year from the shoulders of the parent directly to the child. He is no longer required to do what he has learned during earlier years in hopes that he will want to functions on his own initiative. To illustrate, a child should be required to keep his room relatively neat when he is young. Then somewhere during the midteens, his own self-discipline should take over and provide the motivation to continue the task. If it does not, the parent should close the door and let him live in a dump, if that is his choice.

In short, self-discipline does not come automatically to those who have never experienced it. Self-control must be learned, and it must be taught.