Scientology: Consulting the Child’s Willingness

imageI’m right now in the midst of another fantastic Scientology Life Improvement Course at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. – this one entitled the Successfully Raising Children Course.  Today’s course period was reading a jaw-dropping set of essays on dealing with children – one that specifically answered some of the more deep questions I’ve had brewing about parenting. 

Specifically, one very central argument that is sometimes brought up in parenting circles is the age-old question of how much leash to give to your kids – how much do you try to control what they do and boss them around, and how much do you leave up to them? 

Some parents, perhaps because they were brought up with overbearing families themselves, think that they should just let their kids do whatever they want to do – and not be “so controlling”.  Others are the total reverse, and end up with kids constantly throwing temper tantrums because mom or dad is just dragging them around everywhere, not letting them do anything of their own choosing.

The answers to a lot of this came in one particular section in the course, which deals with Consulting the Child’s Willingness.  In the article, L. Ron Hubbard said, when referring how to handle children:

You take one of two courses.  Either you run expert control with lots of communication back and forth between you and the child and so on, or you just let him grow.  There is no other choice.  Kids don’t like to be mauled and pulled around and not consulted.  You can talk to a child and if your A-R-C (affinity, reality and communication) is good with him, you can make him do all sorts of things.  He will touch the floor, his head, point you out and find the table if you ask him to do these things.  He will fool around for a while and after that you can just say do so-and-so and “Let’s go and eat” and he will do it.  He has found out that your commands are not necessarily going to override the totality of his willingness.  So your commands are therefore not dangerous.  You have confronted him and he can confront you and he can do something.

— LRH

He then goes on to say:

Sometimes, when it is time to go to bed, a child says, “I want to stay up with you” and will insist on doing so, exerting power of choice.  Just letting a child do what he is doing and not interfering with him and not running any control on him is psychology.  If you treat children like this, they are never going to be in communication with anybody.  They won’t grow or get experience in life for they didn’t change their havingness.  They didn’t have to change their mind, work, exercise or do anything.  But they respond very readily to good control and communication.  It certainly takes good communication to override this – not persuasion but good communication. 

— LRH

The article then proceeds to detail the positive ways to go about working with the childs’ willingness and using communication to solve these conundrums of how to get children to do something that they factually need to do (like eat, sleep, not put their head in the oven, etc) without making it a competition between your will and theirs.

Just an outstanding article that I’m going to read a few more times to brew on fully.

If you’ve you’re a parent and haven’t yet gotten yourself onto one of these Life Improvement courses for parents, they’re just a treat.  Very inexpensive and they’re only 3 days part time, and available at any Church of Scientology or Mission.


7 thoughts on “Scientology: Consulting the Child’s Willingness

  1. This is so true! LRH has quite some fasinating quotes like that on Children. I use them daily and keep reading them over and over as one can not learn enough.

  2. Sorry, I don’t quite get the following passage: “Just letting a child do what he is doing and not interfering with him and not running any control on him is psychology. If you treat children like this, they are never going to be in communication with anybody.”
    Does it mean we should grant their wish in this example? Thanks!

    1. Hey Mark – thanks for your comment. No – in this case the stress is to develop and use good two-way communication with your kids. Like the opening section of that quote,

      “You take one of two courses. Either you run expert control with lots of communication back and forth between you and the child and so on, or you just let him grow.”

      The idea being that you don’t want to be evil and overbearing, or force kids to go to bed with duress or threats or physical harm. But if you don’t run any control on them at all you just end up with kids that are tired all the time at school as they’re not getting sufficient sleep. The only real workable course of action there is to be able to get into communication with the kids, such that they can understand well where you’re coming from when you tell them that their body is going to need to sleep, and so that you understand too what they’ve got on their minds so that you can act appropriately.
      Tad (ScientologyParent) recently posted…Why I Brought My Kids to the Grand Opening of the Church of Scientology of Salt Lake CityMy Profile

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