Habits: the inspiration

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  • anniepeter
    Participant

    Sonya, if you have time I’d love to get your thoughts on this.  I’m just reviewing LDTR and I’m struggling with how to implement this first step of providing an example/story for inspiration.  I’m having trouble reconciling these two thoughts.  “The mother knows how often and how ingeniously the tale must be brought to his mind before the habit… is formed…” and “… This sort of sowing (a great idea) should be rare and casual because of a child detect a definite purpose in his mentor he is apt to stiffen himself against it.”  Could you enlighten me please?  I want to do this but I see the concern in doing it wrong and crushing it’s power to help.  Anyone else have thoughts/ experience on this?

    Sonya Shafer
    Moderator

    You’re right that we don’t want to be at all heavy-handed with habit/character training. A lot of the difference is in how ideas are presented. We want to lovingly lay out good ideas couched in beautiful literary passages with time to digest them; not bombard the child with goody-goody formulaic stories every day. We want to present the ideas as worthy and beneficial for everyone’s lives, including ourselves; not talk down to the child as if he is the only one who needs to instill this habit because he’s in the way and a trial and tribulation to our sanity.

    If we are to give our children an endowment, some habits will simply be a way of life in our homes. We probably won’t need to focus on direct teaching of those; most of them will be “absorbed” from the atmosphere of our homes. But other habits will require some focus and “vision casting” in order to bring them to the children’s attention and help them imagine what they look like.

    In other words, we don’t use habit-training as a system——do these 3 steps and all the children will be perfect; we use it as a method——keep the goal in mind and use all the helpful tools at hand to accomplish the goal.

    anniepeter
    Participant

    Thank you very much!

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