Shaping The Will Without Destroying The Spirit

It didn’t take long for us to figure out Eric was a strong-willed child—in retrospect the sentinel moment was probably when he refused taking anything from a bottle when I went back to work. After his week-long hunger strikes, my dad finally drove him in every three hours (twenty minutes to our house, twenty minutes to my workplace, then all again in reverse) so I could run out in between cases to nurse him in the car.

It wasn’t long before I was in the bookstore taking notes from every book on the strong-willed child ever written. One phrase that stood out to me was how one ought to “shape the will without destroying the spirit.” Sounds nice, but how does one practically do that? I couldn’t find a great explanation anywhere. Maybe, I thought, it means to discipline in calmness instead of anger. Or to blame behavior rather than character. Or to give some options for choice to retain the child’s sense of self-will.

It’s been a few years since then, and I’ve practically come to realize that teaching a strong-willed boy basically involves three things: you identify the behavior and learn about your child to understand why it is he acts that way; you teach him what is wrong about his behavior; you teach him what underlies the behavior and redirect it to a good or appropriate outlet.

It’s pretty easy to focus only on the second part: his behavior is unacceptable, and you discipline him for it. In certain situations that’s all you can or need to do, but if we focus only on this step, I find the behavior tends to recur, leading to cycles of frustration, and sometimes bad labeling of the child in your or his mind. He starts to see himself as a bad person; he gets that what he does is wrong but doesn’t know how to change.

But I think the difference between “shaping the will” and “destroying the spirit” is like the difference between feeling guilt and feeling shame. Feeling guilt is when you feel bad about something you did. Feeling shame is when you feel bad about who you are. I don’t want Eric to feel bad about who he is, but I do want him to realize what he did was wrong—and so, I need to be able to separate the two myself. That means I need to learn and understand why it is he acts a certain way, and only then can I not only give negative consequences for bad behavior, but affirm and redirect the underlying good character traits and impulses underlying it.

It sounds simple, but I’m constantly learning more about Eric: there’s layers and layers, which all play together. There’s the strong-willed temperament; the highly introverted personality type; the gender predispositions (highly-competitive, more aggressive and active than his sister); the tendency to resist change, to rise to a performance; the physical touch love-language; the changing age-related developmental stage; and more.

Understanding him changes how I discipline and teach him: it influences my own expectations and views of him, and what I do to get through to him. For example, when he throws a tantrum, I don’t just give him a time out (works him up more) or spank him until he submits (ditto). We talk about how it’s okay to feel angry, or need time to cry, but that we don’t hurt people and eventually we do need to calm down. What seems to work best is shutting him in his room to give him time to cry and be mad, but then to promise beforehand that I will come to get him after five minutes (some folks advocate processing emotions physically with him but I haven’t found that helpful and it tends to make me lose my temper).

After five minutes, I come in and ask if he wants to be held (love language, and I find it almost always is fruitless talking to him before I hold him a bit). We talk about why what he did was wrong. Usually I can tell he feels embarrassed or bad about it and we pray to say sorry to God.

But then I also talk about the things inside him that can make him this way. Instead of “stubborn” or “strong-willed,” I say he has a “strong heart,” and sometimes it makes him want things a lot, or get very frustrated if he doesn’t get things, and that can be a really good thing. I talk about how Mommy is like that. But I talk about how sometimes in our lives, God doesn’t give us what we strongly want, because he wants us to learn something important, because it’s not the best for us and he loves us, and ultimately even if we don’t know why, we have to obey and respect God, and that’s why I ask him to obey and respect me. We talk about not letting our strong wants blind us to what others need.

I go through some variation of this often, and sometimes I can’t get him to say much other than he wants me to hold him, but sometimes I see a light go on, or he asks a question that shows he’s been processing it (during this last conversation, “no, Mommy, my heart’s not there, it’s there!”—moving my hand from the center of his chest to his lower left chest. It’s metaphorical, buddy).

It’s a work in progress, and what works now may not be what works in another year. But I do think understanding your child, the hows and whys behind how they act the way they do, is the key to not just enforcing behavior, but reaching their heart. At least that’s the hope. We’ll see how it goes.