the days of the Puritans, the 1800's,

[Beauty4Ashes]

Were they really so much more godly than the days we are living in now? Or were they just much more legalistic and secretive about their societies ills? Could someone tell me a bit about those days and why their discipline/children should be seen and not heard is idealized by some Christians today as the answer to all of our problems?

[Hermana Linda]

:popcorn An interesting question. However, since none of us were actually alive in those days, we don't really know much. :shifty I think you are right.

[Beauty4Ashes]

http://www. elisabethelliot.org/  devotional.html

This is what someone posted on another group that I am on.  The comfort of discipline.  Another member commented how the initial part was not age appropriate and quite puritanical (children should be seen but not heard)...Hence the question.  I am starting to wonder though, did the Pearls plagiarize their ideas from Elisabeth Elliot?  The contempt for children and child training methods seem to be awfully similar.  :shrug

edited to more completely break the link

[Hermana Linda]

Interesting. Yeah, that puritan ethic seems to be pretty prevalant in that belief system.

[Katydid]

That article was horrible and Grace-less. :sad2

[Beauty4Ashes]

The motive for discipline is love. Its purpose is salvation from the Elisabeth Elliot devotional section titled
"the comfort of discipline.

Does this sound like heresy to anyone? Didn't Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection become the means of our salvation? He didn't die on the cross only for us to continue being punished by God above for our sins. Our sins are banished as far as the east is from the west, correct? So if we say that the parent's discipline of their child (or rather punishment) has the purpose of saving the child, we are putting our own work in the place of God, yes?

[Katydid]

The motive for discipline is love. Its purpose is salvation from the Elisabeth Elliot devotional section titled
"the comfort of discipline.

Does this sound like heresy to anyone? Didn't Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection become the means of our salvation? He didn't die on the cross only for us to continue being punished by God above for our sins. Our sins are banished as far as the east is from the west, correct? So if we say that the parent's discipline of their child (or rather punishment) has the purpose of saving the child, we are putting our own work in the place of God, yes?


Yes, that's what I thought when I read that. :td

[allisonintx]

Puritain midwives had a saying, "The first baby can come at any time, and the rest take nine months"

[LadybugSam]

Puritain midwives had a saying, "The first baby can come at any time, and the rest take nine months"


:giggle

[Katydid]

Puritain midwives had a saying, "The first baby can come at any time, and the rest take nine months"


:giggle


I guess I'm slow, cause I don't get it.... :shifty :O

[allisonintx]

So many women were pregnant when they got married that babies came in a couple of months after the wedding, rather than the 9 months they usually take from when the pregnancy is announced.

[Katydid]

Ah, gotcha. ;) Sorry I'm a bit slow on the uptake! :shifty :O :giggle

[MarynMunchkins]

I think we've romanticized quite a bit about the past. People are people, regardless of history. :) Children weren't magically better behaved because they lived on a farm or were switched. :shrug

And I really like that Puritan saying. :shifty Doug took about 6 months to get here. ;)

[Piper2]

So many women were pregnant when they got married that babies came in a couple of months after the wedding, rather than the 9 months they usually take from when the pregnancy is announced.

:giggle I'm sorry, but that SO reminds me of the story about my great-uncle (grandpa's brother). He married this girl (her father said he'd give him a pig if he'd marry her, which I guess was valuable at that time) who was obviously pregnant. Everybody kept telling him she was, and he kept saying no, she's just fat. 3-4 months later, she had a baby, and everybody said see, we told you she was pregnant when you married her. His response (which has become family legend) was, "Humph...don't take me always to do nothing!" which meant he was so virile, he could make a baby in 3 months rather than the conventional 9. ;)

[hey mommy]

My IL's call those babies "premature".. They weren't technically premature, but since they came sooner then 9 months after the wedding..

[Rbonmom]

:laughtears

ITA that many have ideas that it was so much more spiritual back then. I think every generation (including the Puritans) feels that the current generation is corrupt and previous generations were better. It's not reality, just the way people are :shrug My mom HS'd us and was really into the Puritans and we read tons of stuff about them (many sermons, writings, etc...), but they just came across as very legalistic and graceless to me. That seems much worse than where we are right now. No one in Christianity nowdays is burning people to death or drowning them, and in church you don't have someone walking around thumping people on the head if they fall asleep :jawdrop

[cklewis]

There's a TON of history on the Puritans. We know actually quite a lot. I haven't read the article yet, Tammy. But I will. My shelves are filled with Puritan histories.

First, remember the Half-Way Covenant. The 2nd and 3rd generations of Puritans in the New World weren't being good church members. They weren't paying their taxes (aka tithes) and weren't attending, etc. So the church created the idea that if your grandparents were baptized in the Church, you could still be considered a member. You were "grandfathered" in.

In sum, they were raising their kids so lousy that no one wanted to be a church member. :/ Not a good model.

I had a blog entry about all this. . . . Never published it.

One more thing -- Jonathan Edwards' uncle was so depressed after one of his nephew's sermons that he committed suicide. :wow Yikes!

Off to read your article.

C

[CelticJourney]

Now I'm itching to raid Camille's book shelf.

[TulipMama]

could someone tell me a bit about those days and why their discipline/children should be seen and not heard is idealized by some Christians today as the answer to all of our problems?

I have a very interesting book (a gift from ParentingDecisions, a member here!) called The Child in Christian Thought (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802846939%3ftag=discoshaman-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26dev-t=13AXQGXYBDSGC6ENP702). It compares different views/teachings in Christian history.

What I took away from the section on Jonathan Edwards was a very Gospel-centric view of children and parenting. He wrote/preached extensively, but in all I have read and the author had read, he never instructs parents to hit their children, ala the modern "Christian" cultural assumptions of parenting. His emphasis was not legalistic. Instead of teaching parents to hit/spank their children, he taught them that they were responsible to communicate the Gospel to their children.

Sooooo. . . I think we need to be careful to not make assumptions about the Puritans/legalism/spanking. They were imperfect, but from the reading I've done, I don't see them teaching the conservative, cultural Christian parenting ideas that are prevalent today.

[mammal_mama]

As to the question about why many Christians think a return to the "children should be seen and not heard" mentality will make society more moral -- I think sometimes people look at two characteristics of a particular time period and assume one characteristic caused the other (i.e. there was less blatant sin back then because of whatever disciplinary practices were most prevalent).

Yeah, I'm sure there were lots of Puritans who had sex before marriage -- but I don't think many Puritan women made a conscious decision to become mothers without a spouse 'cause they just hadn't met the right guy yet and wanted to have a baby while they still could. I think this had less to do with corporal punishment, and more to do with the social/economic structure of that time. It wasn't just more MORAL to get married and be faithful to your spouse and focus your energies on your home, husband, and kids: it was also a whole lot more compatible with survival.

When I read the "Little House" books to my daughter (okay that's a little after Puritan times), what I see are communities made up of families who were working very hard just to survive. People didn't lack compassion for others, but they didn't have the capability to really do a lot for people outside their own families. If a husband died before there were sons old enough to take over the work on the homestead, the wife most often had to go back East and rely on the charity of relatives. In a sense, marriage enabled a woman to be the mistress of her own home while single motherhood could reduce her to a life of servitude.

I just think our society's more capable now of providing a cushion for hard times, and there's less of a sense of finality about ANY choice a young person makes. Young people are less likely to think that a poor choice will permanently screw up their life. Wow! I don't like the direction I'm going with this -- it's like I'm saying that an increase in grace and second chances is the cause of society becoming more openly sinful, and that's not what I want to say at all.

I think sin (turning away from God and His love) comes in many forms, and judgementalism and self-righteousness are just as wicked as sexual sin -- and while our society's more openly accepting of many forms of sexual perversion, we're a lot less accepting of judgementalism. I actually think the sexual perversion is due to kids not feeling unconditionally loved and accepted for who they are -- not specifically because of parental failure but because of failure of our society as a whole to truly love others without attaching some sort of string or control. And someone else on this board talked about the connection between spanking and sado-masichism (associating pleasure with pain). It's a very tangled web, huh?

[Hermana Linda]

:yes You make some very interesting points. I am fond of pointing out to people who don't study the Bible that the Bible says that in the world sees what's good as bad and what's bad as good. So my parents think I'm abusive for not giving my sons the freedom to explore their sexuality and that I'm an ogre because I refuse to renounce my belief that homosexuality is a sin (and my having that belief offends my sister.) :sad2