This morning the dishwasher was emptied. This morning a time-out was paid for a disobedience. Both were accomplished by my 5yo beginning with an angry complaint that soon moved toward moderate forgetfulness to pleasantness and completed with the humming of a made-up song. That old adage, "Change your thoughts" rings so true!
How is this possible?!!! A time out with no crying/anger/name calling etc. etc. I still ask myself that the few times I have witnessed the scenario.
When you remove anger, coercion, raised voice, guilt, or emotion from the equation and enter the Biblical idea of duty (parent & child) in all it’s proper facets, and when you treat your child as a person, it is thoroughly possible to do as Mason proposes. Though she was referring specifically to time spent outdoors, I have taken it one step further and applied it indoors too. Gasp! She says the children "must be kept in a joyous temper all the time," (1/44) and that we are to allow them to live in peace which is "a natural state and condition proper to anyone who will claim it," and is "not to be gained by merit or lost by demerit." (5/416-7)
Just some wild ideas I am pondering...
"Suffer the little children to come unto Me," says the Savior, as if that were the natural thing for the children to do, the thing they do when they are not hindered by their elders. And perhaps it is not too beautiful a thing to believe in this redeemed world, that as the babe turns to his mother though he has no power to say her name, as the flowers turn to the sun, so the hearts of children turn to their Saviour and God with unconscious delight and trust." -Mason (1/20)
The mother "should know how to incite the child to effort though his... sense of duty, in such a way that no one set of motives will be called unduly into play to the injury of the child's character." -Mason (1/141)