I have wrestled with the theoretical and practical dimensions of obedience ever since I had children. Although this topic is most often discussed in the context of parenting, the truth is that long after we outgrow the obligation to obey our earthly parents, we continue to owe obedience to our Creator. My struggles with teaching my children obedience, therefore, seem to reflect my own deep-seated confusion about the nature of obedience, rooted in my historically fearful, scrupulous attitude towards God.
Of course, I did not understand that for a long time. I approached “The Problem of Obedience” as an academic issue. I made it my business to plumb the depths of this topic by tackling both Catholic virtue theology and scientific parenting research. About five years into my parenting career, I realized, thanks to the intense anxiety I felt about my children’s behavior, that my OCD had gotten its talons into a new area of my life.
I ruminated endlessly over discipline, particularly the thorny controversy over corporal punishment; and more broadly, the behavioralist attitude that external manipulation of rewards and consequences is the essential ingredient of effective discipline. I felt trapped between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis that always crop up when my OCD is at work.
On one side of the argument trumpeted aggressive proclamations that corporal punishment is cruel, ineffective, psychologically damaging, perhaps even abusive, and that external motivation in general undermines the budding seeds of internal motivation. On the other side, equally dogmatic voices insisted that if one chooses not to utilize these traditional approaches, one is condemning one’s child to a life without self-control or virtue, or at least making their path much longer and more difficult.
Beneath all this lay my own deep discomfort with anything smacking of manipulation, aggression, or coercion; but I feared that this discomfort was nothing more than a symptom of weakness. The instinct itself screamed for my attention, but due to my intrusive self-distrust, I was condemned to swirl in the middle. I could neither accept nor ignore it.
Meanwhile, my children’s obedience was not developing as I would have hoped. As I anxiously threaded the path between the principles I was afraid to admit I endorsed, and the intrusive voices in my head, I felt like a constant failure. More consistent application of my principles did not seem to help, but neither did my reluctant lapses in adherence.
Thanks to our journey into the world of neurodivergence over the past year, I have come to realize that part of the explanation for this struggle is that I am raising at least one child with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), if not more, and I likely have long-suppressed PDA tendencies myself. As I briefly noted in a previous post, PDA is a controversial sub-profile of autism, characterized by a highly sensitive nervous system that experiences losses of autonomy as threats to survival. As a result, people with this neurotype spend a disproportionate amount of time in fight/flight/freeze/fawn (survival) mode, which does not make sense from the outside unless you understand the trigger of autonomy sensitivity.
From that perspective, it is not surprising that my direct efforts to procure obedience often failed. In fact, they frequently activated my child’s survival drive, causing behavior that superficially appeared even less obedient than before I intervened, although this actually reflected deeper stress. Indeed, my efforts to establish control were contributing to a mounting cumulative stress load that was soon to have other consequences for this child and for our family.
What is Obedience?
And yet, obedience is a virtue. As I orient to the new world in which I find myself, I am realizing that I have pondered and prayed over this topic enough to have a fairly coherent perspective on the virtue of obedience. My challenge has been learning to ignore the intrusive voices and act on that perspective, trusting the quiet whisper in my heart which I believe represents God’s ongoing guidance in my life.
The church values the virtue of obedience, partly because it helps a child form their independent faculty of prudence so that they can take over self-government as they reach maturity. In essence, the parent’s prudence directs the child towards the good before he is able to direct himself, and in the process, informs the development of the child’s own prudence for the future. Filial obedience, then, serves the child’s own good.
Furthermore, although children will eventually outgrow their obligation to filial obedience, they never outgrow their duty to obey the God who made them. This is the long-term significance of the virtue of obedience. It is not just a temporary, place-holder virtue, but endures throughout our dependent relationship with God.
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When I was first trying to wrap my mind around this, I simply could not make sense of the traditional American approach that seems to begin with fear-based compliance. Although this is supposed to convert to love-based cooperation as a child matures, I have never understood the mechanism by which that is expected to occur. It seems to me that, at best, genuine parental love and support eventually create enough trust and security to foster the growth of virtue despite early fear; and at worst, that divide is never crossed.
Thus, while I honestly admit that I have seen this method work out, I am not convinced it is the most efficient approach to helping any child cultivate true virtue based in love rather than servile fear. Beyond that, I think that for some sensitive children, such as those with a PDA profile, fear-based coercion can directly undermine the development of true virtue.
But what is the alternative?
Natural Development of Obedience
As I was initially working through this issue, I encountered the work of Maria Montessori. To date, she is still the only Catholic thinker I have found who philosophically elucidates a clear pathway for the development of the virtue of obedience that harmonizes and capitalizes on a child’s natural development. The most important concepts I found in her work are:
a) Obedience, like every other virtue, develops slowly over time. Instant compliance is not the same thing as virtue. We treat anger management as a habit or skill to develop; we treat patience that way. Why do we not see obedience that way?
b) Obedience naturally grows out of trust, not fear. Therefore, the starting point in this process of cultivating the virtue of obedience must be fostering trust, not establishing fear.
c) A child can naturally develop obedience in a prepared environment where the limits are clear and age appropriate, and where they have freedom within those limits to make small but real choices and experience the real consequences of those choices.
My Experience
This approach became my general philosophy. It was enough to help us survive, but as I explained above, the dynamics of cooperation and obedience have never functioned smoothly for us.
For a long time, I blamed myself for not applying my hard-won principles consistently enough. I am fallen and imperfect, and sometimes fail to impose an appropriate natural consequence, or even a consequence at all, or to impose it calmly. Yet when I would double down on consistency, committing to applying my principles systematically and with greater self-discipline, my children would become more stressed.
If I had trusted myself more, I might have realized that my natural awareness of the underlying tensions working against compliance in our family were the main reason I was not always consistent in imposing consequences or applying principles. I instinctively sensed that consequences, even of a gentle and natural variety, were increasing my children’s stress level and undermining their trust in me. This caused me to gravitate towards alternative methods of fostering cooperation, even as I felt guilty and permissive for doing so.
Sometimes these alternative methods worked; other times, they did not. Either way, they required a far greater expenditure of my own energy, patience, and emotional resources than more “traditional” methods. The judgmental voices in my head told me that I was not being firm enough, and that this emotional toll on me was the fruit of my own weak parenting.
My deeper instincts whispered that this was the work of love: pursuing the hearts of my children by humbling myself to meet them exactly where they were. I now see that, while the truth contains a nuanced mixture of motivations and realities, the primary reason for my exhaustion was that I was caring for at least one child with a disability, if not more; and this was the area in which that disability had the greatest impact.
Underlying Fears
Regardless, I continuously struggled to trust my instincts. For every fleeting moment of clarity, I experienced a backlash of anxious rumination and self-doubt. My intrusive fears told me that the loving instincts grappling their way to the surface were disordered, opposing more traditional disciplinary approaches out of distaste for conflict, laziness, or prideful reluctance to admit I had been wrong.
Beneath those fears, I was haunted by the deeper terror that all my principles were actually wrong; that I could not be a good parent without being a harsh parent; that my children could not develop virtue unless I became more arbitrary and rigid; that my ideals of loving and supporting them into virtue were false. This idea felt abhorrent to me, but my harsh inner critic saw that abhorrence as a sign of weakness, and shamed me for it.
And deeper still beneath that fear lurked the specter of my scrupulous relationship with God. Consciously, I believed in a loving, merciful God; but some part of me has always seen Him as terrifying, harsh, and rigid. If my ideals of love and mercy towards my own children were wrong, I subconsciously sensed that this would mean my conscious concept of a loving God was wrong too. Thus, I dreaded the discovery that my parenting instincts were mistaken, because of what it would mean for my own, deeply-desired trust and intimacy with God.
Yet as time passed, that nagging fear grew louder and louder. My children were not rapidly growing in the outward manifestation of obedience. No longer could my doubts blame imperfect application of good parenting principles. At this point, I could not silence the terror that my loving principles were simply wrong.
To my subconscious, it did not matter that campaigns of increased disciplinary strictness usually triggered spirals of panic and mayhem in our household. My fear whispered: “Maybe that is what my relationship with my children is actually supposed to look like.” Even subconsciously, this possibility filled me with dread and misery.
The Present
I have finally begun to realize that, as usual, Scylla and Charybdis were not the only options. When I surrender my anxieties to God in humble trust, I consistently find that He opens a third path beside the two feared options paralyzing me in dread. Neurodivergence in our family, especially in the acute form of PDA, has undermined the natural development of obedience; but this does not mean that my instinct to prioritize love, safety, and trust was wrong. On the contrary, it may have been our saving grace.
PDA and related issues are nervous system disabilities that impact the “felt sense” of safety and undermine the development of trust. As a result, parents have to focus heavily on building and maintaining trust and safety in order to obtain any cooperation whatsoever from children suffering from these challenges. Success is not a matter of exerting more control to produce the outward appearance of “obedience,” (even for kids who are capable of performing to those standards, which, I have finally realized, my most PDA child is not). If we really want to support the development of the virtue of obedience, we have to foster deep trust, and delicately cultivate a child’s growth in cooperation from there.
This matters because, long after they grow up, our children will always owe obedience to God; but this is meant to be a virtue flowing from a relationship of deep trust and intimacy, not based in a servile terror of an overbearing deity.
As hard as it is, I desire to support that development earlier in my children than I have experienced it myself. At the same time, I am also realizing that my children’s actual development of virtue is somewhat out of my control. In my heart, I believe I am called to love them towards virtue, not scare them into it; but that the ultimate choice will be their own.
Catholic and OCD 