Many of the most popular teachers in the evangelical parenting empire are advocates of, and “experts” in, something they call “child training.” The idea of training children can be seen all over the empire’s materials, from the titles of books like Reb Bradley’s Child Training Tips and Michael and Debi Pearl’s To Train Up A Child to recommended practices like blanket training and corporal punishment to the core belief that children’s wills must be broken (and not simply nurtured and guided).
But what is child training? Is it just parenting or is it something more?
Child training is not a synonym for parenting but it is a parenting tool. In evangelicalism, the concept dates back to at least the 1890s when Henry Clay Trumbull wrote a book called Hints on Child-Training. Trumbull, an American clergyperson and evangelical pioneer of the Sunday School Movement, argued in his book that child training is “the shaping, the developing, and the controlling of [a child’s] personal faculties and power.” Trumbull distinguished training a child from teaching a child in the following way: “The essence of teaching is causing another to know. It may similarly be said that the essence of training is causing another to do” (emphasis in original). In short, child training is about controlling a child’s body, mind, and soul so that the child does what is asked of them.
Another author in the 1890s who wrote on child training was Charles Spurgeon. A Baptist preacher in England, Spurgeon penned Come Ye Children: A Book for Parents and Teachers on the Christian Training of Children, published posthumously in 1897. In his book, Spurgeon argued the training of children should begin in infancy: “We cannot begin too early to imbue the minds of our children with Scriptural knowledge. Babes receive impressions long before we are aware of the fact. During the first months of a child’s life it learns more than we imagine. It soon learns the love of its mother, and its own dependence; and if the mother be wise, it learns the meaning of obedience and the necessity of yielding its will to a higher will.”
As Trumbull notes, training is not everything parents do with their children. Parents also teach, model, encourage, protect, advocate for, rebuke, and so forth. So, child training is one of many parenting tools. Of course, some evangelical parenting teachers think it is the most important tool. Lou Priolo, for example, declares in Teaching Them Diligently: How to Use the Scriptures in Child Training that child training is “the most important aspect of true biblical parenting” (p. v).
But even adults who consider child training to be an essential aspect of how they parent never equate the two as if they are one and the same. Parenting is everything parents do with their children, whereas child training is a time-specific discipline regimen that evangelical parents are supposed to begin with their children in infancy and use until the child’s will is fully broken, usually ending in the teenage years (which is when most, though not all, child training advocates say corporal punishment of children should end).
Here is how child training works: When the child is an infant, parents begin with blanket training. This is straightforward behavior modification training using corporal punishment, or what secular behavioralists like Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson call “classical conditioning.” (Think about Pavlov’s dog experiments or Watson’s Little Albert experiments.) You place an infant on a blanket and then put something the infant would want or desire some distance away from the blanket. When the infant crawls off the blanket towards the desirable item, you hit the infant and return them to the blanket. When the infant crawls off the blanket again, you hit them again and return them to the blanket. You repeat this process until the infant becomes afraid to leave the blanket and thus “obeys” the parental command to stay on the blanket.
Blanket training does not always have to involve blankets, but the principle behind this training remains the same in other variations. In To Train Up A Child, for example, Michael and Debi Pearl discuss using a bowl to train an infant: “To train him, place the bowl within easy reach. When he reaches for it, say, ‘No,’ and thump his hand. He will pull his hand back, momentarily looked alarmed, and then reach again. Repeat the action of saying, ‘No’ in a calm voice, and thumping his hand. After several times, you will be able to eat in peace” (p. 7-8).
The Pearls also train infants in this way to fear and avoid staircases. They write, “One of our girls, Shalom, who developed mobility early, had a fascination with crawling up stairs… For her own good (and our peace of mind), we attempted to train her not to climb stairs by coordinating the voice command of ‘No’ with little spats on her bare legs. The switch was a twelve-inch long, one-eighth-inch diameter sprig from a willow tree” (p. 9). The Pearls say Shalom was only 5 months old when they whipped her with this willow tree branch.
The Pearls find “biblical” justification for the idea behind blanket training in how God interacted with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in the Hebrew Book of Genesis. In a section in their book titled “Plant Your Tree In The Midst Of The Garden,” the Pearls claim that “God wanted to ‘train’ his first two children not to touch,” and so “he did not place the forbidden object” (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) “out of their reach.” Instead, God placed the tree “in the midst of the garden.” This is because “God’s purpose was not to save the tree, but rather, to train the couple” (p. 5).
As a child becomes older and capable of reason, parents can add modification to the children’s emotions and wills as a goal as well. Tedd Tripp calls this “shepherding” (p. xx) in his book Shepherding a Child’s Heart. Tripp argues that behavior modification alone is insufficient child training: “Most of us spend an enormous amount of energy in controlling and constraining behavior. To the degree and extent to which our focus is on behavior, we miss the heart.” This is a problem, he writes, because “straying behavior displays a straying heart” (p. xi). In other words, child training that focuses on behavior modification alone is like putting a drugstore bandage on a gunshot wound. It may stop the bleeding for a second, but if the wound is not dealt with, the bleeding will recommence shortly. For Tripp, then, children must be trained not just behaviorally but also through their emotions and wills. Children must “internalize” the training (p xxiii) and experience “internal change” (p. xxii).
But it is more than just general internal change that child training teachers are after. As Reb Bradley writes in Child Training Tips, the internal change needs to be so powerful that it overrides the child’s own will and desires, completely reshaping the child’s nature: “The Hebrew word for ‘rear’ (gadal) bears out this concept. To rear a child literally means ‘to twist unto greatness.’ The Hebrew idea of rearing children was to bring them up to maturity by twisting them against their nature. Twisting requires firm effort, sustained throughout their childhood” (p. 17).
The goal of all this training and twisting is to gradually and comprehensively condition children to immediately and happily obey adults’ commands. This is called “first-time obedience.” When an adult gives a command to a child, the child is expected to jump to attention and politely and cheerfully obey without further cajoling. You should “expect to receive instant obedience” (p. 6), the Pearls write.
Child training, therefore, is more than simply classical conditioning. It is also conditioning the children’s emotions and wills, with the goal of molding children into people who want what their parents want, who want to obey parental commands. Evangelical child training teachers often speak about “capturing” a child’s attention and heart, such that the child’s will comes into full alignment with the parent’s. Childrens’ wills are sinful and thus evil, they say, and so Christian parents should replace their children’s wills with their own. Christian parents must be “benevolent despots” who “exercise authority” and “require obedience” (p. xx), writes Tedd Tripp, because “something is wrong in the heart of the child”—namely, “even a child in the womb and coming from the womb is wayward and sinful” (p. 20). “There are things within the heart of the sweetest little baby,” Tripp warns, “that, allowed to blossom and grow to fruition, will bring about eventual destruction” (p. 101-102).
Tripp’s warning reveals what is at stake for evangelical parents and why evangelical parenting teachers have such a strong grip on parents. Without adequate child training, these teachers declare, children’s sinful, evil wills will triumph, leading children to lives of crime and violence and ultimately an eternity in hell. This bleak view of children is seen in Bradley’s Child Training Tips: “All children, not just certain children, but all children are born delinquent. If permitted to continue in their self-centered world of infancy, given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy every want, every child would grow up a criminal, a thief, a killer, a rapist” (p. 20).
While parents cannot determine their children’s eternal destinies, parents are told by their leaders that they are responsible for restraining their children from such sin and evil. In his book Family Shepherds, Voddie Baucham explained that, “[A police officer] does what he can to resist the criminal and restrain him, knowing that his duty—while ultimately limited in its ultimate effectiveness—is necessary. It’s the same for parents.”