Tuesday, October 02, 2007

The Training of Habits

Charlotte Mason believed children could be taught to govern themselves. She encouraged the training of habits beginning in babyhood saying, "Habit is ten natures."

A mother should pick a bad habit that "vexes" her and then concentrate on replacing it with a good habit. Miss Mason recommended working on a specific habit over the course of 4 to 6 weeks, working on only one habit at a time.

Mason believed habits such as paying attention, perfect execution, obedience, honesty, even temperment, neatness, kindness, respect, recall, punctuality, gentleness, and cleanliness can be trained into a child.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok , I buy that with all our normal kids. but Speaking as a mom who tried to get her son to use polite respectfull language and ended up with a kid out picking up rotten peaches as his choise rather than being inside having lunch and using extream language like "please" ... I could use some help. I admit that he is ten and we decided long ago that we had to pick our battles with him but frankly if no one can stand his rude behavior it does not matter if he is brilliant or scrubing toilets he will not get friends or Jobs. Our six weeks on manners are about us and he has almost stoped talking because we insist he speak clearly and politely.
sos jan

Teresa said...

Have you read How To Really Love Your Angry Child by Campbell. It might help get through to him.
Prayers.