From children, obedience to their parents in all things is required, and therefore in

many things contrary to their inclination and opinions. Childhood means dependence and
ignorance. It is only under the shelter of parental oversight that the incipient faculties and
plastic nature of the child can be formed to the strength of judgment and firmness of
character which will enable him to meet the tasks and the perils of adult life. And for this
discipline to be effective, the submission of the child must be absolute. Only when a
parental command plainly contradicts the Law of God and violates the child’s conscience,
can any kind of disobedience be justified. …
If the child be allowed, through passion or persistence, once successfully to rebel, a
mischief is done not easily to be repaired. His own self-mastery, and the sense of law and
of duty which are to attend him through the whole of life, largely rest on this basis of
ingrained obedience. For this purpose, children should be in their earliest years as much
as possible under the direct influence of their parents’ presence and authority. The
parental office cannot be discharged by proxy. And there must be unity of parental
administration, as well as harmony between precept and practice, if a true and reverent
obedience is to be possible.
In no State was the authority of the father (patria potestas) so strict and absolute as in
ancient Rome. And there can be little doubt that this stern maintenance of family
discipline largely helped to form the Roman character with its extraordinary vigour and
tenacity, and to preserve that rigid, firmly knit order and devoted loyalty which were the
secret of Rome’s invincible strength.
On the other hand, the father must beware lest his authority should wear a needless
aspect of severity. His righteous desire to “command his children and his household after
him”, and his anxious sense of responsibility, may occasion this, if not relieved by more
genial influences. The innocent liveliness and the many unintended offences of
childhood must not provoke him to ill temper. He must learn by patience and tenderness
to win the child’s affection and open-hearted trust, without impairing its submissive
reverence. A mechanical, unsympathetic strictness, or an angry and unequal discipline,
will fatally alienate the sensitive heart of the child, which in that case either sinks down
into a dull, spiritless apathy, or prepares for a passionate revolt when the hour of its
strength shall come.
Too often those most anxious to comment religion to their children have made it
odious by presenting it in forms unintelligible to the young mind, and associating it with
tasks unsuited to its powers, and burdens that it found “grievous to be borne.” As the
child should find in the child Jesus its pattern and model, so the parent should seek to be
to his children an image of “our Father in heaven.”

The Pulpit Commentary, Colossians p. 167-168, Colossians 3:18-22, (G. G. Findlay)

See also: Genesis 18:19, Luke 2:40-52

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Wisdom of Sympathetic Parenting

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