civility in the christian home

A few weeks ago I was sitting in an outdoor area and overheard an argument between a teenage boy and his mother. The son was refusing to do what his mother had asked. After shouting back and forth at each other for a few minutes, the mother ended the encounter by yelling “F____ you, Kevin!” and storming away. I was pretty unsettled by what I had witnessed. Surely a decade ago when Kevin was a cherub-faced little boy being tucked in at night, his mother could never have conceived of a day when she would have an exchange like this. How had things deteriorated so badly?

As a mother of three teens and a tween, I can vouch for the fact that the teen years are times of sudden conflict over unexpected topics. But they don’t have to be times that conclude with civility lying bleeding in the gutter. Civility, the practice of treating others with kindness and respect, is foundational to society, and even more so to the Christian home. Why? Because it lives out the Great Command. When Christ admonished us to love our neighbors as ourselves he pointed us not toward fair treatment of others, but toward preferential treatment: We want others to treat us better than we deserve. We should treat others that way. However, as parents we sometimes forget that our children are our neighbors. And the end result is the scene I witnessed between Kevin and his mother, the result of a home where civility has gone missing.

Our culture wants us to believe that civility cannot survive the teen years, that we should resign ourselves to exchanges like the one I heard. Hence, the oft-repeated knowing phrase “Just wait until they’re teenagers.” But this is precisely the problem: too many of us wait until our children are teenagers to realize the importance of civility, understanding its value only as we watch it walk out the door.

Civil children are the product of civil environments. Many parents feel free to speak to their children with a level of incivility they would not use with anyone else they know. They bark orders. They raise their voices. They use sarcasm and contempt: “Seriously? That’s how you cleaned your room?” They poison civil language with contemptuous tone: “Ryan, please put your shoes on.” They patronize. They eye-roll or sigh. They construct a cocktail of word choice, tone, and body language that they would not serve to a co-worker, a friend, or a stranger on the street. And then they serve it liberally to an under-aged consumer - the smallest neighbor they are called to love preferentially - their own child.

Yet they are shocked to end up with an adolescent who is fluent in the language of contempt.

Many of us have wrongly defined our homes as places where parents are to be respected rather than as places where everyone is to be respected. Children do not hold equal authority in the home but they do hold equal personhood, equal dignity. They are image-bearers of God, every bit as much as their mothers and fathers. As such, they deserve kind words, level tone, neutral body language. Even when they disobey. A child who is consistently treated with respect is far more likely to treat her parents with respect, no matter what her stage of life.

Parents of young children, look toward the adolescent years by asking yourself some critical questions now:

• Do I address my child with kindness and respect, even in conflict?
• Do I use my tone and body language to communicate civility or contempt?
• Do I guard my child’s exposure to media sources that model uncivil exchanges between children and adults?
• Do I teach my child that civil words are not merely “magic words” that achieve a desired result, but are “moral words” that obey the Great Command of preferential love?

Parents of uncivil adolescents, ask yourself the same questions. It is never too late to start doing the right thing. You may not be able to rein in your adolescent’s incivility, but you will begin to obediently model preferential love toward him and to live at peace with him as far as it is possible with you.

Christian parents must begin early to train their children in the language of civility. They must do this because it is good for families. They must do this because it is good for society. They must do this because it portrays the character of the Father, who responded to the rank incivility of human sin with a Word of profound kindness and a preferential love beyond our ability to grasp. In the civil word of the gospel is found our redemption. May it be spoken in our homes as it is written on our hearts.