Sirach 30:8

4. Discipline and restraint. Farseeing fathers also make provision for the necessary discipline, guidance, correction, and sometimes restraint of their young and immature offspring.

Among ancient savages, discipline of children was begun very early; and the child early realized that disobedience meant failure or even death just as it did to the animals. It is civilization’s protection of the child from the natural consequences of foolish conduct that contributes so much to modern insubordination.

Eskimo children thrive on so little discipline and correction simply because they are naturally docile little animals; the children of both the red and the yellow men are almost equally tractable. But in races containing Andite inheritance, children are not so placid; these more imaginative and adventurous youths require more training and discipline. Modern problems of child culture are rendered increasingly difficult by:

2. As a child, life had been made too easy for him. He bitterly resented thwarting. He always expected to win; he was a very poor loser.

Following these years of rigorous discipline and training and just before marriage, the young men were usually released for a short period of leisure and freedom, after which they returned to marry and to submit to lifelong subjection to the tribal taboos. And this ancient custom has continued down to modern times as the foolish notion of “sowing wild oats.”

3. The weaned child.

1. Is courage — strength of character—desirable? Then must man be reared in an environment which necessitates grappling with hardships and reacting to disappointments.

3. No affectionate father is ever precipitate in visiting punishment upon an erring member of his family. Patience cannot function independently of time.

18. Impatience is a spirit poison; anger is like a stone hurled into a hornet’s nest.

4. While wrongdoing is always deleterious to a family, wisdom and love admonish the upright children to bear with an erring brother during the time granted by the affectionate father in which the sinner may see the error of his way and embrace salvation.