He That Will Have His Son Respect Him…

On the teaching and training of children, John Locke said: “For you must take this for a certain truth, that let them have what instructions you will, and ever so learned lectures…daily inculcated into carriage will be the company they converse with, and the fashion of those about them.”

This impresses the importance of what we do and what we are, as compared with what we say—the words we speak, as compared with what others see in us and feel from us. And as to parents, as to teachers, as to all of us, never should we suppose what others will do what we say more surely than what they see us do.

“Manners,…” continued John Locke, “about which children are so often perplex’d and have so many goodly exhortations made them…are rather to be learnt by example than rules;…Having under consideration how great the influence of company is, and how prone we are all, especially children, to imitation, I must take the liberty to mind parents of this one thing, viz., that he that will have his son have a respect for him and his orders, must himself have a great reverence for his son. You must do nothing before him, which you would not have him imitate…He will be sure to shelter himself under your example,…If you punish him for what he sees you practice yourself, he will…be apt to interpret, it [as] the peevishness and arbitrary imperviousness of a father, who, without any ground for it, would deny his the liberty and pleasures he takes himself…Children (nay, and men too) do most by example. We are all a sort of [chameleons], that still take a tincture at in children, who better understand what they see than what they hear…”

These are sobering thoughts because of the responsibility they place upon us all. Beyond the mere routine of teaching, beyond the mare saying of sentences, beyond the mere speaking of repetitious truths—beyond all this, to be most effective and most convincing, we have to be, and should be, the living witnesses of the truth of what we teach.