Ep 03 | Habit: Your Repeated Beingness

Written By Autumn Kern

There’s a lot to habits in a Charlotte Mason philosophy: How are they formed and what part do they play in virtue? Which ones should we focus on and when? And do they really matter in the early years?

The heartbeat of habit training all begins in Miss Mason’s idea of a mother’s ‘thinking love’ for her children. Moms are qualified by God to be primary shapers in their children’s lives, which means we have a duty—and a delight—to cultivate the God-given faculties in our kids. We want to equip them so they are able to joyfully serve God throughout their lives. When it comes to habit training, the question before all of us is: to whose service should this child’s heart, head, and hands be dedicated and directed?

Welcome to Habits 101.

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READ THE TRANSCRIPT

Before we dive into the world of habit training, which as you just heard at the top of the episode involves me learning to bring water bottles, I want to let you know that after all the interest in our Benediction Table mentioned in Ep 02, I’m working on a little guide and template to help you create your own rhythm at home. Since I work on this podcast as a fun project in the margins of my time, it’ll take me a few more weeks, but when it’s ready, I’ll pop it in the inboxes of A Commonplace Note subscribers. If you want to make sure you get it, you can join us at thecommonplacepodcast.com/newsletter. 

All right, let’s get to today’s episode.

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You know, I thought I’d just do a little episode on habits in the early years, but as I started pulling it all together, I realized this needs to be more of a series. There’s a lot to habits in a Charlotte Mason education. How are they formed? What part do they play in forming virtue? Which habits should we focus on and when? Is there a practical method to habit training? And does this toe the line with works-based righteousness? 

And after all those questions, we haven’t even touched on the particulars of specific habits like obedience and attention. 

So to get started, we’re going to dig into the duty and delight of well-formed habits, the brain science of habit formation and identity, and the basics of building habits in the early years or, you know, the practical side of habits. We’ll zero in on the specifics of certain habits later.

Let’s gather ‘round, because we just started a series.

Now I have to get something out at the start of the episode because I need to cut off the potential, “But wait! What abouts?” that may sound in your brain: habit training is not about salvation. What I’m about to explore is not a system for raising up perfect children, full of virtue, who have no need of a Savior. What I’m doing is thinking about human nature and design, and looking at how we, as people, just work...how we become, or how we repeatedly do things and what those repeated things do to us. 

Habit training isn’t about behavior modification by our own power. God has made our brains form habits automatically; it’s an act of common grace to everyone. Like a natural law, anyone can form good habits whether or not they acknowledge the Great Habit Maker, which is why there are non-Christians with good character. So we’re working with God’s ordering when we help form good habits in our children. We want to equip them with habits that will allow them to joyfully serve God in their lives. This is actually possible, and it’s necessary. Just consider the flipside of that statement: allowing bad habits in your children that will impede your child from joyfully serving God. That is also possible. Lord willing, your child’s heart will burst into life in Christ by God’s grace, but his or her habits will come with them too. If there’s a habit of lying before salvation, it doesn’t just disappear overnight after salvation. But if there’s a habit of truthfulness beforehand, how much brighter will that shine in service to Christ? Which means a mom’s duty is to model, correct, and shape her child’s habits towards what is good with the hope that all of it will be used for God’s glory.

This is actually what Charlotte Mason referred to as a mother’s ‘thinking love’ for her children. Basically, moms are qualified by God to be primary shapers in their children’s lives. We have a duty and a delight to cultivate the God-given faculties in our children. Because the question before all of us is: to whose service should this child’s heart, head, and hands be dedicated and directed?

So that’s what I’m talking about today: mothering a self-acting, self-developing born person in a way that helps a child turn towards goodness. Can we all work with that?

I think so.

We’ll let our girl kick us off: Miss Mason gives a clear warning that a mom who lets habits take care of themselves in a child will have a weary life of constant friction with her children. Which, of course, makes sense. Who among us hasn’t had one of those days where you wonder if anyone hears you when you speak? It’s not hard to think of how frustrating it is to live with unruly, disobedient kids. (Side note: it’s also not hard to think of how frustrating it is to live with an unruly, disobedient mother, but that’s a different episode.)

You see, all born persons are law-compelled and law-abiding, because there is a God-given absolute moral law for everyone. It’s innate, which is why everyone has a sense of right and wrong even if it’s been shifted wrongly from the true standard. Your kids can learn to govern themselves according to their own standards of what they want, what they like, and what they think they deserve, or you can help them cultivate habits that help them turn their emotions and desires towards what God says is good. You can actually help them grow in virtue. It’s kind of the point of education after all. 

Now, according to Aristotle, virtue comes in two sorts: thought and character. Thought virtue comes through teaching, so that’s our vision over the course of our homeschooling. But character virtue comes from habit; it’s formed through repetition like muscle memory. What I love about character virtue is that your ‘best self’ can’t just live up in your head; it has to be something lived out in your real actions in a broken world with broken people. Aristotle, and others like Plato and Quintilian, insisted that the thing that made all the difference in forming character virtue was that it started in early childhood. 

Have you ever heard or caught yourself saying, “I think it’s just a stage,” for things ranging from throwing food on the ground to huge meltdowns? I have. And while it’s true that there are stages or seasons of particular struggles, that doesn’t mean the inner problem will just pass on its own. The things we repeatedly do—even in toddlerhood—become our nonconscious habits. For example, your child may stop throwing his food on the ground out of anger, but the repeated behavior of angry protesting has started to form as an emotional habit. It’ll just look different through the years. 

Now the relationship between habits and character is a little more nuanced than you might think. Habit isn’t character and vice versa. Character has habits, but working on a habit doesn’t mean you have the right character. 

Is that a little confusing? 

Let’s take the example of honesty: it has the habit of telling the truth. When you tell the truth without thinking about it, it’s your habit and, because you have the habit, you have an honest character. The primary characteristic of habits is that you don’t have to *think* about most of them. Habits are automatic.

This is actually kind of a bummer for me because a lot of times, I’m muscling my way towards what I know is right. I know I ought to be patient even though I live in a house of toddler logic, but I have to remind myself to be patient forty-five times a day. Which is, of course, good to do. You train yourself through effort towards a habit, but if you’re still fighting towards it, it’s not really a habit yet. So, basically, dear listener, I’m not nearly as virtuous as I’d hope to be by this point in life. 

But anyway, when a good habit is formed, and you delight in doing the good thing, then it becomes part of a virtuous character. Miss Mason observed that as your effort lessens and lessens through repetition, the habitual action becomes pleasurable. Basically, you like doing what’s good. 

Now for all of us born persons around here, our habits are formed through our repeated behaviors. Your brain automates whatever you do frequently because then your conscious brain can push that sequence off to the unconscious parts of your brain. You can really only focus on one problem at a time, so anything that can be put on an “if this, then that” auto-pilot, will be. 

You can form two types of habits, and I like the way James K. A. Smith names them: mundane and meaningful. Everyone has to learn mundane habits like making your bed, brushing your teeth, or closing the back door when you go outside to play. (Ahem, my children. Take note.) These are the commonplace habits of life and our kids need to learn them. Then there are the meaningful habits like the habit of obedience or attention. You can’t really learn anything without those two habits, so they’re more meaningful than bed-making. But there’s a third angle here: forming mundane habits that are actually wrapped up in a meaningful habit.

For example, learning to put dishes away, wiping down counters, chopping vegetables, and other kitchen work seem like mundane habits of family life and order. But over here, I’m trying to teach my kids to be helpful in anyone’s kitchen. I want them to feel comfortable and be capable of seeing a need in someone else’s kitchen and know how to jump in and meet it. The meaningful idea is the Kernel rule for service: we’re first in, last out. But I can’t really train a meaningful habit of service or love of neighbor without also training the mundane kitchen habits. They’re all wrapped up together. 

They’re also all wrapped up in the brain. Did you know our actions form themselves into our brain tissues? Crazy, I know. But the structure of our brains is like a muscle, so it gets stronger the more often it’s used. When you repeatedly do something, you strengthen that area of the brain until it forms a muscle memory or a reflex. It’s almost like your habits are written into your body. 

You know that phrase, “You become what you behold?” It has a whole new meaning when you realize you’re also physically formed by what you behold. 

But this is what Charlotte Mason was circling around when she talks about habit in ten natures. The born person is inclined to be a certain way by nature, but good habits can be ten times as strong as nature. I’ve wondered if this is why she made habits one of her three tools of education. Her phrase “education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life” isn’t a quippy, hippy phrase. It’s actually the three tools of a Charlotte Mason education, and the discipline tool is habit. She believed that habit rules 99 in 100 of our thoughts and actions, so education has to be, in part, a proactive focus on a child’s habits because education is about forming a person.

Usually, when we think about habits, we think only about the actual behavior. If you want your child to eat more vegetables, most of your thoughts go into which vegetables, how the vegetables look on a plate, the number of vegetables and so on. But your habits are more than just actions; they’re how you embody your identity. 

Identity comes from the Latin words essentialis, meaning being, and indentidem, meaning repeatedly. So your identity is your repeated beingness. And this makes a lot of sense because you can’t continue to act in a way that’s incongruent with who you believe you are. It’s one thing to help a child to eat a certain amount of vegetables a day, but it’s another thing to help a child learn to be someone who cares well for his body. It’s the difference between saying I want this and I am this. 

I once came across someone’s summary for the whole New Testament written as: be. who. you. are. And I loved that because it irrevocably links identity with habit and behavior. Your identity is in Christ, now go act like who you are. 

When we think about habit formation in our kids, we need to start with who they are. We need to flip the script of modernity and remember first, they are made in the image of God to become like the image of Christ, and second, they were made for truth, goodness, and beauty. 

Bad habits are just the default for an untrained child or adult. When we see a kid, or, you know, have a kid, throwing a pity party, it’s not that that kid has a strong will. It’s actually that they have a very weak will. They’re completely ruled by their own emotions! But what we can do, is day after day, or as Miss Mason wrote, tick after tick, help them build a strong will by choosing what is right over what is easy or most natural. 

The point being, of course, choosing what is right. Children are given one command in the epistles: Ephesians 6:1. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for it. is. right. This isn’t to put children in a position of being leashed to authoritarian parents. It’s a gift to them. Knowing what is right and being equipped and encouraged by their parents to do it gives our children freedom. Almost daily I tell my kids that a self-controlled man is a free man, and I want them to be free. I’m pretty sure you want yours to be free too. We don’t want to abandon them in what is easiest and most natural so they’re ruled by ever-changing feelings and circumstances. We want them to be able to self-govern in accordance to what God has called good. 

Okay, let’s pivot here over to the practical beginnings. This is already so much and we’ve barely dipped our toes into all things habits.  

Miss Mason reminded mothers that ‘nothing is trivial that concerns a child,’ but she paired that with a tip: don’t take on the whole world--choose one habit and tackle one habit. If you’re thinking about your kids and seeing a lot of habit work to be done: welcome to the mother’s club. Be observant, be faithful, be long-suffering. Miss Mason repeatedly mentions the importance of focusing on one thing fully, and then adding another habit and then another. It isn’t a full-force attack on the nature of a child, but it is consistent in training and in guarding what has already been learned. 

Okay, the Charlotte Mason 101 of habit training for which I’m partly indebted to Brandy Vencel. Are you ready?

You have to commit yourself to the work. It’s going to require time and energy, so know that going in. She likens it to caring for a sick child: a time when you’re highly attentive, available, and noticing and anticipating needs to help your child. It’s no small order. Not only are there many habits to form, but also, kids are hilarious. One of mine can be so hilarious in their disobedience that I have to turn around so they don’t see me laugh. Their cute little faces smirking back at you, testing you on the steadfastness of your own words, can be hilarious but it can also be where we miss our opportunity. I’ll just leave you with more Miss Mason when she says: to laugh at ugly tempers and let them pass because the child is small is to sow the wind.

So, next: pray, pray, and pray. Particularly for strength, perseverance, and joy. This is work God calls us to as moms, but as we plant, he brings growth. And as we plant, he’s also bringing growth in us. 

Next, remember you and your kid are a team. You are acting for your child in this: so communicate how you’ll tackle this together. How you’ll give a gentle and joyful reminder, and how you’ll also require consistency. I remember it hit me one day that I was being pretty unloving towards my kids when I told them I was going to help them with a new habit but then let it slide a few times because it would require me to stop cooking or walk upstairs or some other inconvenience. You can’t let the bad habit come back or let the good habit be skipped. 

When you give the child a reminder, make sure it’s given pleasantly. So much of habit training, and just motherhood in general, is about being a self-controlled person ourselves, isn’t it? Giving gentle reminders doesn’t mean you’re not challenging your kid or calling them to do better. You can challenge them to a higher standard while being a gentle partner in the work. 

Consider teaching or reviewing the habit when it’s a low-risk situation. For example, I’ve taught my kids to come running to the stroller or to me when I yell a particular goofy phrase. If I shout it on a busy playground, they’ll come 90% of the time. But I didn’t teach them how to do it when we needed to get to the car quickly or when it was busy or any other things that might pressurize the situation. I practiced it when we were alone on the playground by telling them to go run and play as hard as they could until they heard me shout. Then we tried it. And we tried it again. And I ran after the one who thought I meant to head to the stroller after you’ve completed another slide run and had him re-run the drill enough times until he got it. Now I give a simple reminder as we topple out of the van, and when it’s time to go, they come. This all circles around the idea of anticipating and thinking through how you can help your child succeed. Just like with potty training. You might plan to always ask if your kid needs a bathroom break before you head out for an errand. You may remind them. You may limit their water when out of the house or a whole host of other things to help them grow in their ability. You do the same with these other habits. 

Lastly, guard the habit. This is probably where most of us misstep. I know it is for me. You’ve worked on a habit, it’s happening consistently, and then one day you notice the bed isn’t made when you walk past the kids’ room. “Eh, it’s no big deal,” you think to yourself. Or maybe you just go make it up quickly yourself; it didn’t take much time to make their beds, did it? But Miss Mason warns against this. It’s the quick unraveling of the habit. We all know, it’s far harder to teach and establish a good habit than to fall back into or pick up a bad habit. If you don’t guard the habit, the habit won’t stick. 

Well, that was a lot. But isn’t it amazing to think God has made us in a way that we can understand so much of how we learn and grow? That he would create a whole world of natural order and law and invite a mother into the beauties of his work? This isn’t a burden, but a high calling, my friends. One of great duty, yes, but, by God’s grace in our strivings, one of great delight. 

I’ll see you in two weeks. 

Autumn Kern
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Ep 04 | Habit: Obedience
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Ep 02 | Remember, Remember, Remember