Herbert Armstrong's Words on Child Rearing: Only suitable For Printing on Charmin.

Herb's Perfect Child. 

The psychologists who reject the revealed Word of God cannot rightly teach you how to rear children. They do not know what the human mind is. Unless they have the Holy Spirit — and I know of no such psychologists — they are incompetent to teach authoritatively on child rearing.*(HWA)

In my previous posts, I have brought up a portion of mindfulness that involves the balance required between the emotional mind and the logical mind, and balancing out the two extremes to find a good meeting ground for common sense.This led me to thinking about the aspect of childhood behavior.

I'm not a pediatrician or a child expert at all. So this is not going to be anything scientific or rooted in any kind of great knowledge. It's just going to be an opinion piece. So take that with a grain of whatever it's worth. Nothing I say here is substantiated by any expert or personal skill. They're the thoughts of a writer who is simply expressing thoughts, which can be discussed in the comments section below.

Herbert Armstrong, the leader of the Worldwide Church of God, the cult that I grew up in and thought was the one true church - would often say in his letters about children:

" In earliest childhood, Satan — the invisible spirit ruler of this world — begins to work on the child's mind. He broadcasts not in words, sounds or pictures, but in attitudes of selfishness, hostility, disagreement, resentment and self-will. Many parents neglect teaching their children's minds. They wait until teachers at school can teach them."*


 In Herbert's mind, the "attitudes" of selfishness, of hostility, disagreement, resentment, and self-will were "satanic" - an influence from an evil spirit. I contest this thinking wholeheartedly as absolute malarkey.

When a child is born, a child is absolutely and completely innocent, and without knowledge. A child has absolutely no concept of what is or is not logic. He only knows emotion. Logic is acquired through experience, when you have enough information to deduce that something is not going to harm you. 

This afternoon, while I was looking out the window, I saw a young mother walking her little baby (just old enough to toddle walk in diapers). The baby tried to run a little to catch up to her, who was just about ten feet up the sidewalk with groceries. The baby tripped on his own feet, and immediately began an instinctive cry. This was emotion - displayed because if insufficient knowledge to make a logical analysis on the situation that the hurt was only temporary. Since there was no balance on the "logical" bank, the "emotional" bank took over because it's all the brain had. A child never has problems displaying emotion. It knows nothing at all abut logic. 

The emotional side of a baby is very sensitive and learns quickly. A baby remembers, but does not have the logic to know how to logically use emotional information. If a parent removes a bottle of juice from a baby's mouth, the baby will react, cry, and remember. The next time the baby is given juice, the child will deduce because of lack of knowledge to form logic that the parent is simply just going to take the juice away, and will pull back. This is what Herbert would call selfishness, or an "attitude problem", and would blame Satan. He would call this a baby being "in disagreement". 



But, even though limited to only the human spirit, he still had a mind that could think, reason, calculate, make decisions. What an animal does is by instinct. What a human does is by thought — by reason — by decision!
Now see where this leads us. You train a growing child as you would train a dog or an elephant to do certain things a certain way. In some cases, because it has become habit, he may not change it.- HWA*

Resentment is learned. If a parent acts harshly to a baby, the baby's emotional side will remember. Resentment is not an attribute that just "happens". Resentment often happens because of mistreatment of the only thing a baby has - emotions. Any "logic" the baby has built up is extremely limited, and harsh treatment of a baby can take up a large part of the baby's "logical" banks. There's just nothing else to go on. To say satan "injects" resentment into a baby is simply to deny that the person saying such never did anything to cause resent in the first place. Common sense says this isn't the case. There are babies that have severe emotional problems due to a brain chemical imbalance which causes them to act in a way that is not appropriate. Herbert would call this "satanic". He'd probably try to exorcise it then get it the help it needs clinically!

Self-will? It's interesting that Herbert calls this "Satanic", since he himself admits he himself was full of this problem and caused his parents a world of trouble. as far as babies go, it's a driving part of their intense curiosity to learn about their whole new world. Only an authoritarian would call this drive "self-will" and think of it as evil. 

Instead of recognizing the makeup of the human mind - the emotional brain, and the logical brain, and seeing how this develops in our earliest years, and observing the sensitivity of the emotional mind and the lack of logic a baby has which is developed only through experiences and the acquisition of knowledge - Herbert only saw things through the mind of a dictatorial authoritarian, where any attitudes of natural emotional development were automatically a satanic spirit dead set about being rebellious. 

There can be no calculating how harmful, illogical, and stupid this kind of thinking was, and did to the precious babies who were simply developing and learning based on the only knowledge they had.

Just a statement: If I was HWA's baby, (Thank God I wasn't!)  I too, think I would become self-willed, stubborn, rebellious, hostile, disagreeable and selfish. 

Oh yeah - I forgot - just look at Garner Ted!
 
*The Plain Truth About Child Rearing, Plain Truth, October 1984. HWA.