As I've read been reading through Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschooling Series... particularly the first volume- Home Education, I shared how we should have a method to the madness in our "schoolrooms",  how we need to consider the whole child in their education, both inside and out, the importance of the great outdoors, some practical applications Charlotte directs us to, and even some more practical applications.


Now we get even meatier... with habits.

The formation of habits is education, and education is the formation of habits. 

We struggle mightily with habits in our home. We have LOTS of habits, it just seems to me that none of them are good ones. We assault each other verbally (and sometimes physically) daily, have complaining spirits, are lazy, argumentative, and selfish and I know that training our children away from these types of behaviors comes with the parenting territory, but it can be feel discouraging when you've been repeating the same things for over a decade. It feels as though little progress is being made. Especially when you have watched certain habits from the older children spill over into younger brothers and sisters behavior patterns. Habits that were established years before they were even born.

For example, my oldest daughter when she was very young and not able to speak well in order to express her displeasure, would, I guess you could call it, grunt. As each sibling has come along, they have all acquired the same habit of grunting exactly as they have learned from their older brother or sister in a trickle down effect.

As a young mother, I genuinely believed that each of my children would grow out of this and other habits and, of course, now experience has taught me that isn't the case.

Conformation of the child's brain depends upon the habits which the parents permit or encourage; and that the habits of the child produce the character of the man, because certain mental habitudes once set up, their nature is to go on for ever unless they should be displaced by other habits. Here is the end to the easy philosophy of, 'It doesn't matter,' 'Oh he'll grow out of it,' 'He'll know better by-and-by,' 'He's so young, what can we expect?' and so on. Every day, every hour, the parents are  either passively or actively forming those habits in their children upon which, more than upon anything else, future character and conduct depend.

{Parents} let a child grow free... trusting... that the grace of God will prune... but the poor man endures anguish, is torn asunder in the process of recovery which his parents might have spared him had they trained the early shoots which should develop by-and-by into the character of their child.

 It is necessary that the mother be always on the alert to nip in the bud the bad habit her children may be in the act of picking up from... other children.

In the case of homeschooling mothers, our work ought to be much easier because we can be constantly alert to what bad habits our children are picking up on because they are the bad habits of our other children and we are intimately acquainted with them.

It is as if every familiar train of thought made a rut in the nervous substance of the brain into which the thoughts run lightly of their own accord, and out of which they can only be got by an effort of will.

The thoughts beat, beat, beat, in that well-worn rut of ways and means, and decline to run in any other channel, till the poor man loses his reason, simply because he cannot get his thoughts out of that one channel made in the substance of his brain. And, indeed, "that way madness lies" for every one of us, in the persistent preying of any one train of thought upon the brain tissue. Pride, resentment, jealousy, an invention that a man has labored over, an opinion he has conceived, any line of thought which he has no longer the power to divert, will endanger a man's sanity.

Were our children attending public schools, those thoughts may have beaten a well-worn rut long before we ever notice it.

But,- supposing that the doing of a certain action a score or two of times in unbroken sequence forms a habit which it is as easy to follow as not; that, persist still further in the habit without lapses, and it becomes second nature, quite difficult to shake off; continue it further, through a course of years, and the habit has the strength of ten natures, you cannot break through it without doing real violence to yourself;

Here we see how important it is to keep watch over the habits of enunciation, carriage of the head, and so on, which the child is forming hour by hour. The poke, the stoop, the indistinct utterance, is not a mere trick to be left off at pleasure,' when he is older and knows better,' but is all the time growing into him in the very substance of his spinal cord.

For example: 

To correct bad habits of speaking, it will not be enough for the child to intend to speak plainly and to try to speak plainly, he will not be able to do so habitually until some degree of new growth has taken place in the organs of voice whilst he is making efforts to form the new habit. 

Despite the ease of doing so, we mustn't become discouraged! I beat myself up daily, hourly at times- a great distraction from the enemy and certain waste of the precious hours- when I shouldn't become so "weary in well-doing."

It is unchangeably true that the child who is not being constantly raised to a higher and higher platform will sink to a lower and a lower. Wherefore, it is as much the parent's duty to educate his child into moral strength and purpose and intellectual activity as it is to feed him and clothe him; and that in spite of his nature, if it must be so. 

'Habit is ten natures.' If that be true, strong as nature is, habit is not only as strong, but tenfold as strong. Here, then, we have a stronger than he, able to overcome this strong man armed... Habit runs on the Lines of Nature... {and} nature is not to be permitted to ride rampant.

The object of intellectual education is to create such indissoluble associations of our ideas of things, in the order and relation in which they occur in nature; that of a moral education is to unite as fixedly, the ideas of evil deeds with those of pain and degradation, and of good actions with those of pleasure and nobleness.

What we can do for them is to secure that they have habits which shall lead them in ways of order, propriety, and virtue, instead of leaving their wheel of life to make ugly ruts in miry places... {by} the cultivation of persistent habits... It rests with parents to lay down lines of habit on which the life of the child may run henceforth with little jolting or miscarriage, and may advance in the right direction with the minimum of effort... He depends upon his parents; it rests with them to initiate the thoughts he shall think, the desires he shall cherish, the feelings he shall allow.... {Children} are what their mothers have brought them up to; and as a matter of fact, there is nothing which a mother cannot bring her child up to.

And an oh so important word of caution we are given as we embark in the important duty of bringing them up- the heart issue. Is this our fear? Our motivating force?

'What will people say? what will people think? how will it look? and the children grow up with habits of seeming, and not of being; they are content to appear well-dressed, well-mannered, and well-intentioned to outsiders, with very little effort after beauty, order, and goodness at home, and in each other's eyes.

It is often mine. Too often this drives my actions- is my stimulus when correcting a child.  With a large family I worry that others are watching for my children to slip up. Or in my haste on a busy day, I set the children on the right path without reaching deep to their hearts.

I stand convicted.

Thankfully,

We are all mere creatures of habit... The cerebrum of man grows to the modes of thought in which it is habitually exercised.

And we can rest in the promises the Lord gives us that changing our habits, replacing the bad ones with good ones is possible in Him-

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me... If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.... Put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. 

Psalm 51:10, 2 Corinthians 5:7, Ephesians 4:22-24

Unless otherwise noted, all excerpts are taken from  Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschooling Series