Obedience in the Family — Part Three
The Triad Is Completed
In the first article, Obedience in the Family, we set out the Christian order of the family: the husband as head after the image of Christ, the wife as the receiving heart after the icon of the Church, the children as the fruit of this union. In the second article, The Love Between Spouses, we showed that this order is not held together by constraint but by love — the sacrificial love of the husband gives birth to the loving honour of the wife, and from this grows obedience — neither forced nor rendered with a clenched heart.
Behind these two articles stands the broader theme of Love: the Foundation, Measure, and Summit of the Christian Life: without this love, obedience becomes coercion, and parental authority becomes pressure.
Now the triad is completed. For the Christian order of the family and the love between spouses, however well established, are not yet whole without the third bond: the love of parents for their children, and the obedience of children toward their parents.
And here, more than anywhere, our times reveal a deep crisis, which we shall try to look at honestly.
A Diagnosis of Our Times
Many children today grow up with the feeling that they are not loved. This is no exaggeration; it is a reality visible in every school, in every counsellor’s office, in every family touched by adolescent crisis, by anxiety, by screen dependence, by the readiness to leave home at the first opportunity. Many children grow up in homes where they have everything — clothing, food, expensive schools, phones, screens, private lessons — yet feel that they are not loved for themselves. They seek their worth elsewhere: in peer groups, in social media, in ideologies, in public figures, in any place where they seem to receive the recognition they do not receive at home. And as soon as they can, they want to leave. They leave physically — for universities far away, for other countries, for any space that takes them out from under the pressure of home. Or they leave inwardly — shut in their rooms, in their headphones, in the virtual world, no longer speaking with their parents except when absolutely necessary.
And if someone should ask: “But does not even the beloved child leave? In the parable of the prodigal son, the son departs, though the father loved him perfectly” — the answer of the Tradition is clear. This very parable shows us what true love is: it does not imprison. The father does not stop his son, does not constrain him, does not bind him with guilt — he gives him his portion and lets him go free, for love that enslaves is no longer love but domination. The son’s departure does not come from any lack in the father — in the heavenly Father, whose icon he is, such a lack is impossible — but from the misuse of the freedom that love itself had given him.
And here a distinction must be drawn which our times have lost. One thing is the child who flees from home — out of wound, out of rejection, out of the emptiness of a love never received; and quite another is the child who departs into the world, carrying the love of home behind him. The first leaves away from something; the second leaves toward something. Authentic parental love does not promise us that the son will never leave — for he remains free, and freedom may also choose distance. It promises something else: that, in leaving, the son will have somewhere to return. For the prodigal son returns — and he returns precisely because he remembers that in the father’s house it was good. The love received in the earliest years becomes, in the hour of his fall, the memory that calls him back. The child raised in the desert of a love never received often leaves with nowhere left to return. And of this child — the one who flees — Elder Paisios the Athonite spoke a cutting word to a mother who complained that her son no longer wanted to stay at home: “I myself could not bear to stay with you a single hour; how then could your child stay? You have driven him to distraction!” “No!” she says to me. “I love my child.” “How do you love him, when he finds no rest beside you? He wants to leave home because he longs for a different atmosphere. When he is far from you, the child feels very well. The fact that he does not want you shows that you are the ones at fault. Stop irritating him! You are ruining the child by the way you treat him. Treat him with kindness and patience!”
Parents, on the other hand, are sincerely convinced that they have sacrificed everything. And in a sense they have sacrificed much: they have worked for years to provide for their children, given up their free time, paid for expensive schools, bought them everything they desired. They have truly believed that “I am doing everything for the children.” And yet the child still leaves, still withdraws, still gives no thanks. Then the parents feel wronged, misunderstood, betrayed. “After everything I have done for you…” — the watchword of the modern parent to the child who does not meet expectations.
Here a hard truth must be spoken, but a truth nonetheless: that sacrifice was often a material sacrifice, not a sacrifice of the self. And the self — that is, self-love, of which we spoke in the second article — remained untouched. The parent sacrificed money, time, energy. But he did not sacrifice his authoritarian tone, his conviction that he knows best, his right to criticise, his pleasure in being proved right before the child. He kept his right to shout, to reproach, to tear down at every fault — convinced that “this is how I set him straight.” He may even have struck the child, in the name of an old saying we shall examine below: “a beating comes from Paradise.” And in the end he is astonished that he does not receive from the child the love he believes he deserves.
Here is the key to the diagnosis. The modern parent has made many sacrifices, but he has often failed to do one thing: he has not crucified his self-love. He has not humbled his ego. He has not received the child as a whole person, worthy of respect, of gentleness, of spiritual refinement, but as a possession to be shaped according to his own will.
And the Orthodox Tradition, if we let it speak, shows us something altogether different.
Two Pauline Commandments
The holy Apostle Paul, as in Ephesians 5 concerning spouses, gives in Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3 two linked commandments, which our times have separated — and have lost both.
To children, the Apostle says: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honour your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise” (Ephesians 6:1-2). The obedience of children is the foundation of good order in the home. About this even modern parents have no doubt — they all want it.
But the Apostle does not stop here. Immediately after the commandment given to children, he gives a parallel commandment to parents: “And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). And in Colossians 3:21 he repeats the same commandment, but adds a terrible word: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they be discouraged.”
The discouragement of the child. Here is the word that the holy Apostle Paul names directly — nineteen centuries before modern psychology, before the statistics on adolescent depression, before any sociological study. The Apostle already knew that parental authoritarianism, chronic criticism, repeated anger — produce discouragement in the child. And discouragement, once it settles into a young soul, is a wound that neither time, nor success, nor the achievements of later life can easily heal.
The two commandments are linked. The obedience of children and the gentleness of parents cannot be separated. The parent who provokes his child to wrath wounds his own moral authority and makes the child’s obedience ever more fragile — even if, through fear or habit, the child still obeys outwardly. Forced obedience ceases the moment the child has the physical or material power to abandon it. This is why so many children today, barely into adolescence, leave — physically or inwardly. Because their obedience was sustained by constraint, not by love.
What Authentic Parental Love Is in the Tradition
The spirit in which the holy Apostle Paul asks parents to raise their children is the same spirit of sacrificial love that he sets at the heart of the whole Christian life: not domination, not possession, not constraint, but parental care illumined by Christ. The same love — agape — that makes the relationship of Christ and the Church the foundation of every Christian bond works mysteriously also in the relationship of parent and child. The Christian parent loves his child not by the nature of the flesh, but by the calling of Christ.
Christian parental love is not reduced to natural affection — that, to a certain degree, even animals have for their young. It is natural affection cleansed, illumined, and transfigured by the calling of Christ. Nor is it parental pride — the joy that “my child is the best.” Nor is it narcissistic projection — the desire that he fulfil what I did not fulfil. These last can be forms of self-love disguised as parental love.
Christian parental love is the daily labour by which the parent dies for the child — and not only for his earthly happiness, but for his eternal salvation. Saint John Chrysostom, in his treatise on raising children, formulates the goal with an unforgettable phrase: “Raise an athlete for Christ!“ Not a social winner, not a successful man, not a brilliant one, not a lawyer or doctor — an athlete for Christ. That is, a person able to struggle spiritually, to resist temptations, to endure afflictions, to love in truth, to be saved.
And elsewhere Saint John says plainly: “Teach your child to set no value on money, nor on human glory, nor on this life alone. If he holds such thoughts, he will be wise.” And more sternly: “Let us not strive to amass money to leave to our children, but let us teach them virtue and call down upon them the blessing of God. This is the greatest wealth.”
The modern reader, if he is honest, will recognise here the total reversal of the priorities of the contemporary family. Modern parents wear themselves out with work in order to leave their children money, schools, houses, opportunities. Saint John Chrysostom says: these are not the Christian inheritance for a child. The greatest inheritance is virtue and the blessing of God. The rest comes or does not, according to the will of the Lord — but virtue, once planted, is the inheritance that is never spent.
Parental Self-Love (Philautia)
In the second article we spoke of philautia — “the mother of the passions” according to Saint Maximus the Confessor — as the hidden root of all the pathologies of conjugal love. We meet the same teaching, in a vivid and close form, in Father Cleopa Ilie, who placed it at the foundation of the whole spiritual struggle: “The source of all evil and of every sin, and the root of all wickedness, is self-love, which is an irrational love of the body and is the heaviest and most subtle of all the passions that enslave human nature.” And the remedy, he said, is precisely the word of the Saviour from the parable we have at the very centre of this article: “Whoever wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself… Self-denial is the greatest virtue, which leads a man to holiness and to Paradise.” There we showed that it is not “a lack of love” that destroys the modern marriage, but the fact that each loves himself more than the other. The same diagnosis was given by Elder Paisios the Athonite, who, receiving countless letters about family troubles, saw that nearly all of them sprang from two roots: the distancing of people from God, and their self-love. The same philautia is seen, under another mask, in the relationship of parent and child.
Parental philautia is harder to recognise, because it hides under the appearance of the highest virtue: sacrifice. The modern parent works twelve hours a day for the child, pays for expensive schools for the child, gives up holidays for the child, mortgages his life for the child. It looks like total self-denial. And yet, if you look closely, you discover that the self has not died — it has transferred itself into the child.
Here is the mechanism. The self-loving parent does not sacrifice what he ought to sacrifice — namely his own pride, his own will, his own right to control — but sacrifices what is less precious to him: money, time, physical energy. And the child becomes an extension of his self, a kind of “better me” whom he shapes after the image of his own unfulfilments and frustrations. “I want him to become what I never became.” “I want him to be my pride.” “I want him not to disgrace me.” In all these phrases, so common, the child is no longer a person — he is an instrument of the parental self.
From this spring three signs of parental philautia, visible in any modern home.
The authoritarian tone. The self-loving parent speaks to the child from above, not as an equal. He commands, he does not ask. He decides, he does not enquire. He interrupts, he does not listen. The tone is not that of a father or mother, but of a master — because deep down he sees himself not as the child’s servant, but as his owner.
The critical, demolishing tone at faults. The self-loving parent does not set right with gentleness; he demolishes. At every fall — “You can’t do anything properly,” “You’re a disaster,” “How can you be so stupid,” “You make me ashamed.” The parent believes that by harshness he sets the child straight. In reality, each such word is a blow to the foundation of the soul — and these repeated blows produce exactly what Saint Paul called discouragement.
The confiscation of freedom. The self-loving parent leaves the child no room to be himself. He chooses his university, his friends, his clothes, his opinions. He demands an account for every minute. Here a distinction must be drawn, for not every watchfulness is philautia: the parent sometimes has the duty to watch, especially at younger ages and in adolescence, over what the child encounters — pornography, harmful company, the dangers of the virtual world. Philautia lies not in the care itself, but in its manner: when the parent watches over the child’s life not as a protector, but as an interrogator — without dialogue, without trust, without explanation, turning care into unceasing suspicion. All of this, when it is so, is done under the banner of “parental concern” — but in its depths it is the parental self’s fear of losing control over what it feels to be its own.
And Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia revealed the overturning of this parental philautia in a truth that deserves to be engraved in every Christian home: what the child receives is not the parent’s words, but his inner life. That is: it is not what you say to the child that matters, but what you are in your depths. The self-loving parent may give whole lectures about love, virtue, faith — but the child will not receive the words; he will receive the philautia that gave birth to them. And the child, without realising it, will become self-loving in his turn, or, if he is of a more sensitive nature, will reject everything — the faith, the home, the parents, the values.
“A Beating Comes from Paradise” — The Patristic Reversal
Here we must touch one of the most harmful formulas in circulation among Christian households: “a beating comes from Paradise.” Many parents invoke it to justify striking their children — convinced that it is a scriptural word, or at least a traditional one, sanctioned by the Church.
The truth is otherwise, and must be stated plainly.
First, the expression is not found in Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible does the formula “a beating comes from Paradise” appear. It is a popular proverb, not a revealed word. Attempts have sometimes been made to link it to texts such as Proverbs 13:24 — “He who spares his rod hates his child” — or to later Western formulations about punishment and correction; but, whatever its exact origin, one thing remains clear: a popular proverb has neither the authority of Scripture nor that of the Holy Fathers, and cannot be used as a theological argument for striking a child. And the decisive argument is this: any text about “the rod” must be read in the light of Christ, through the pedagogy of healing, not as a justification of violence. For Paradise is the place of love, gentleness, and communion — not of the blow.
Second, the Proverbs of Solomon cannot be read mechanically, as a simple legitimation of violence against the child. The Old Testament must be read in the light of Christ, who reveals the fullness of gentleness, of patience, and of correction through love. The Lord Himself said: “Learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29). And Saint John Chrysostom, in the fourth century, was already reforming the custom of striking children practised in his day.
Here is what Saint John says in his treatise On Vainglory and the Upbringing of Children: “When you see that fear has had good results, be gentle. Human nature has need also of gentleness.“ That is: even when a certain fear is useful, it must quickly be replaced by gentleness. Saint John does not say “strike him whenever he errs”; he says “be gentle, human nature has need of gentleness.”
And the holy Apostle Paul, as we have seen, warns us: “Do not provoke your children to wrath, lest they be discouraged.” Repeated striking provokes to wrath. And the child’s wrath, suppressed for years under beating or chronic criticism, turns either into discouragement or into rebellion — sometimes into both at once. And thus we lose the children.
It must also be said where, in their depths, scolding and beating come from. For they do not come, as the parent believes, from love and concern for the child. They come from the imperfection of the parent himself — from the weaknesses he cannot acknowledge in himself. The shout bursts out of the impatience the parent has not overcome; the blow, out of the anger he has not learned to master; the verbal demolition, out of his own fear, his own unfulfilment, his own wounded self discharging itself upon the weaker one. The lack of sacrifice, the lack of patience, the lack of gentleness, the deep failure to understand the Gospel’s message — all these are the root from which harshness grows. And because the parent does not see these lacks in himself — or does not wish to see them — he clothes them in the garment of duty: “I correct you because I love you.” Thus the father or the mother become tyrants without realising it, convinced to their depths that they are doing good, when in fact they are casting their own spiritual incapacity upon the child. Here is the tragedy: it is not malice that makes the tyrant, but an imperfection blind to itself. Therefore the first work of the parent who wishes to stop wounding his child is not to change his method, but to see himself — in the light of a spiritual father, of prayer, of the Holy Fathers — and to acknowledge, with humility, the weaknesses that drive him.
Here usually arises an objection that many voice with conviction: “But I was beaten, and it did me good. I was unruly, and I was set straight.” We must take it seriously, for it seems to be a testimony of experience — and yet it conceals a deep confusion. The one who voices it confuses the ceasing of a behaviour with the healing of the soul. The slap stopped the unruliness on the spot, yes; but the Christian question is not “did the act stop?” but “what was imprinted on the soul?” And what is imprinted by striking is not obedience born of love — but a submission born of fear. The behaviour is corrected on the surface; in the depths something else is planted: precisely the wound that Saint Paul called discouragement.
And here is the subtlety few perceive: the one wounded in this way often does not know that he was wounded. And the justification “I deserved it, it did me good” may itself be part of the wound. Often the child cannot bear the thought that the father he loves did him harm — so, in order to reconcile the pain with the love, he tells himself: I must have deserved it. It is a mechanism of emotional survival, not a free judgement. This is why the testimony “I was set straight by beating” does not by itself prove that the beating was good; not rarely it is the very trace of it. A slap received from one’s father is not easily forgotten — even if it is later clothed in the garment of gratitude.
And the gravest consequence is this: the wound of striking is inherited. The child who is struck learns, without words, that this is how you correct those you love — and he will repeat the gesture with his own children, convinced that he is doing good. The chain perpetuates itself from generation to generation precisely because it is masked as love. Only the one who comes consciously out of it — through repentance, through the counsel of a spiritual father, through the encounter with another image of a parent (a saint, a healthy home) — can break it. And to break it is one of the quietest and most precious spiritual works a Christian parent can perform.
There is one further observation that the Tradition allows us to make, looking at the lives of the saints. The saints, as a rule, had a childhood full of love and affection — we have seen it clearly in Mother Gavrilia, raised in the embrace of a family that loved her “very much,” and we shall see it in Saint Porphyrios and Saint Paisios. This is the rule: holiness most often springs from the warmth of a home in which the child felt loved. And when we do nonetheless find in the life of some saint a beating received in childhood, it never appears as a useful pedagogy for which the saint is grateful — but, on the contrary, as an injustice suffered, usually precisely because he fulfilled the Gospel, and which finally drove him to leave home.
So it was with Saint Parascheva of Iași. While still a child, at ten years old, hearing in church the word of the Lord — “Whoever wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me” —, on coming out she met a poor man, took off her own good clothes, gave them to him, and dressed herself in his ragged ones. For this act of mercy her parents scolded and rebuked her. But she, undeterred, repeated the deed on other occasions as well, paying no heed to their rebukes — and some accounts of her life speak even of harsher punishments, including beating. In the end she left her parental home, departing for Constantinople and the life of the desert. Here is the exact picture, turned upside down against the proverb: here it is not the unruly child who is set straight by punishment, but the righteous child who is unjustly rebuked for obedience to the Gospel — and the fruit of the rebuke was not correction, but the leaving of home. Harshness did not make her a saint; her holiness grew in spite of it.
There is one more important point. The modern saints canonised in recent decades confirm, through their own childhoods, that Christian parental love does not include beating. We shall show this concretely, through direct testimonies, in the section on the three living icons.
Discernment: What Is Discipline and What Is Abuse
In saying all this, we are not preaching the absence of discipline. The child needs order, limits, correction. The parent who lets the child “do as he pleases” — under the pretext of respecting his freedom — does not love him; he abandons him. And this abandonment, in our times, is as widespread as authoritarianism. They are two extremes, both fruit of philautia: one of the parent who wants control, the other of the parent who wants quiet.
Christian discipline, however, has distinctive marks which the Tradition has preserved and can recognise.
It is done in peace, not in anger. The Christian parent does not correct the child while fury still burns in him. He waits for the fury to settle. Then he speaks. Saint Porphyrios said plainly: the child does not receive words thrown out in anger; he rejects them instinctively. Only words spoken in peace reach the heart.
It is done with explanation, not with imposition. The Christian parent tells the child why a deed is wrong, not merely that it is wrong. He shows the consequences — spiritual, human, practical. He does not demand blind submission; he asks for understanding. For the goal of discipline is not to produce a child who appears to obey, but a child who understands and freely chooses the good.
It ends with an embrace, not with an open wound. After correcting, the Christian parent takes the child into his arms — shows him that he is loved, that the fault has not changed his status as son or daughter. The child must know that he is loved unconditionally, even when he is corrected. Otherwise correction becomes rejection, and rejection, year after year, becomes discouragement.
It has measure. Saint John Chrysostom asks that discipline be proportioned to the child’s age, to his nature, to the situation. There is no universal rule — there is discernment. And discernment is given by prayer, by the counsel of a spiritual father, and above all by the love that sees the child as he is, not as the parent imagines him.
And abuse begins where these marks are lost. Striking in anger, without explanation, without peace, without an embrace afterward — this is not Christian discipline; it is the discharge of parental philautia upon a weaker soul. Likewise chronic criticism, repeated verbal demolition, public humiliation, constant comparison with other children — all these are forms of abuse, even under the banner of “parental concern.” And they produce the result Saint Paul named with a single word: discouragement.
Discernment, in such cases, is not done alone, within the home. It is done with a spiritual father, with an honest look into one’s own heart, with the reading of the Holy Fathers, with prayer. For parental philautia is, by its nature, blind to itself. The authoritarian parent will swear that “he does everything out of love” — at the very moment he strikes, shouts, or humiliates. Only the gaze of a spiritual father who knows him, or of an honest friend, or of the patristic books, can help him to see what he does not see.
Indulgence — The Self-Love That Weakens
So far we have spoken of a single wound of parental love: harshness. But parental philautia has a second face, wholly opposite in appearance and yet born of the same root — indulgence. If the authoritarian parent wounds the child through harshness, the parent who keeps his child “in cotton wool” wounds him through softness. And, mark this well, this second wound is all the more dangerous because it too bears the face of love.
The indulgent parent always gives whatever the child asks, shields him from every lack, smooths away every difficulty, never lets him meet a “no” — and calls this love. In his depths, however, he confuses pleasing with loving. And often it is not the child he seeks, but himself: it is easier for him to yield than to hold firm, more comfortable to say “yes” than to face the child’s displeasure. Thus he calls “love” what is in fact comfort or fear of displeasing the child. It is the same philautia of which we spoke — the self that does not want to be troubled, does not want conflict, does not want to bear the weight of a “no” spoken in love.
Saint John Chrysostom, whom we have already heard, saw clearly the poison hidden in abundance: “Wealth generally has a harmful effect on children, leading them to neglect the important things of life.” And indulgence is precisely wealth poured out without measure and without restraint upon the child — not only money and things, but free rein in everything, exemption from every effort, shielding from every lack. The child of whom nothing is asked, who never meets lack, who is not allowed to wait, to endure, to labour, does not grow happier — he grows more helpless.
For measured deprivation, given in time and with love, is not cruelty; it is nourishment. A small “no,” a waiting, an effort asked according to his age, a small failure allowed — all these teach the child something that abundance can never give him: that he can endure, that he can wait, that he can overcome. The child shielded from every frustration at the proper age will collapse at life’s first real “no” — because no one accustomed him, on a small scale, to what he will have to bear on a large one.
Here, however, a fine distinction must be made, lest we fall again into the other pit. Not to indulge the child does not mean to deny him tenderness and warmth. On the contrary — Elder Paisios the Athonite said that “the caresses of parents give children self-confidence and help them to face the difficulties of life.” Here is the key to the distinction: true tenderness strengthens the child so that he can face difficulties, whereas indulgence disarms him, shielding him from every difficulty. The one gives him strength; the other takes it away. The loving parent is not sparing of the embrace, of just praise, of warmth — but only of the indulgence that spoils.
Moreover, indulgence feeds the very passion of which we have spoken throughout this article: self-love. The child set at the centre of the world by his parents grows up persuaded that the world is owed to him. He will then find it hard to give, to endure, to honour another, to deny himself — that is, precisely the virtues that Christian upbringing has the duty to plant. Instead of drawing him out of philautia, the parent deepens it in him; instead of raising him as an athlete for Christ, in the words of Saint John, he raises him a slave of his own will.
And here it touches what, at first sight, would seem the opposite of indulgence: permissiveness without limits, abandonment in the name of “freedom.” The parent who lets the child “do whatever he wants” — under the banner of respecting his personality — does not love him more, but leaves him alone. And both indulgence and this soft permissiveness are, at bottom, the same laziness of love: the parent who does not want to bear the weight of a “no.” Saint John Chrysostom names the matter harshly, as a sin, not as a gentleness: “Parents who do not wish to rebuke or in any way displease their children commit a great sin, even when these children live a disordered and immoral life. To set right and correct children is a moral duty, and if parents are negligent, they will answer for it.”
Here, then, are the two faces of the same philautia: harshness, which wants control, and indulgence, which wants quiet. The one crushes the child’s will through fear; the other softens it through abundance and permissiveness. Both proceed from the same place — the parent’s self, not the child’s good — and both arrive at the same end: a soul unprepared for the struggle of life. The Christian way is neither the one nor the other, but firm love: the love that knows how to say “no” as well, that sets limits, that asks for effort — but says all these in peace, with explanation, separating the deed from the person, and never withdrawing love as a punishment.
Saint Porphyrios — The Holiness of Parents as the Foundation of Upbringing
Here we come to one of the most luminous voices of the last century on the raising of children: Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906-1991), canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013. Saint Porphyrios spoke very often about the education of children — because he saw it as one of the great wounds of the modern world. And he said, with a clarity that ought to overturn the entire pedagogical thinking of the contemporary Christian parent:
“For children to be freed from their various inner problems, advice, constraints, logic, and threats are not enough. Rather they make things worse. Setting right comes through the sanctification of the parents. Become saints, and you will have no more problems with your children. The holiness of the parents frees the children from problems. The children will grow up beside holy people, with much love, who do not frighten them, nor confine themselves to lecturing, but make themselves an example of holiness and prayer.”
This is, beyond doubt, the most overturning sentence in all of modern Orthodox literature on education. Overturning because it shifts the responsibility. The modern parent believes the problem is the child — that he must be “made to obey,” “made to learn,” “made to change.” Saint Porphyrios says: the problem is you, parent. Become a saint yourself, and the child will change on his own. Or, more precisely: the child will see what you are, and will desire to be like you.
And Saint Porphyrios adds: “Do not pressure the children! What you have to say, say it through prayer. Children do not listen except when grace comes, enlightening them to listen to us. When you want to tell the children something, go to the Mother of God and let her do the work. Your prayer will spiritually comfort the children and soften them.”
This is a pedagogy wholly different from the modern one. Modern pedagogy says: “communicate,” “explain,” “set limits,” “be consistent,” “use techniques.” Saint Porphyrios says: “pray. Become a saint yourself. Speak little, but pray much. Let the Mother of God work where you cannot work by words.” For, as the same Saint said, “words strike the ears, whereas prayer goes to the heart.”
And the conclusion, in Saint Porphyrios’ own words: “What you live, that you also impart to your child. Does Christ shine within you? This passes to your child.” Here is the key. The child will not become what we tell him to become. He will become what we are. The praying parent will beget a praying child. The wise parent will beget a wise child. The gentle parent will beget a gentle child. And conversely: the authoritarian parent will beget either a submissive and discouraged child, or a rebellious one — never a free and believing child.
Saint John Chrysostom — The Diagnosis for Our Times
Saint John Chrysostom wrote about raising children with a depth and a lucidity that make his fourth-century text sound as though it were written for our times. Here is what he saw in Antioch sixteen centuries ago:
“All parents took care to secure for their children wealth, clothing, servants, lands. The one thing they did not care for was the cultivation of their souls, namely that the young should become virtuous and devout.”
Change “servants” to “electronic devices” and “lands” to “financial investments,” and you have the exact description of the contemporary family. Modern parents care obsessively about everything except one thing: the soul. They buy the best clothes, pay for the best schools, enrol the children in the best private lessons. But they do not teach them virtue, devotion, the fear of God. They do not take them to the Liturgy on Sundays. They do not teach them to pray. They do not bring them to confession. And later they are astonished that these same children, grown up, have become spiritually barren.
Saint John is very severe with parents who do not attend to the child’s soul: “Parents who do not wish to rebuke or in any way displease their children commit a great sin, even when these children live a disordered and immoral life. To set right and correct children is a moral duty, and if parents are negligent, they will answer for it.” That is: the lack of correction is not love; it is abandonment. The Christian parent does not leave the child to the mercy of his passions under the pretext of “respecting his personality.”
But — and here the whole refinement of Christian pedagogy is seen — if rebuke is a duty, it must nonetheless be done with measure: at the proper time, with gentleness, in such a way as to set right without wounding. A just rebuke, but thrown out at the wrong moment — when the child is still upset, ashamed, or in front of others — can do more harm than good. Here is a moving icon of this measure, from the life of Saint Silouan the Athonite. His father, a simple peasant, had once given the whole family, out in the fields, pork to eat on a Friday, through carelessness about the fast — and the son had cooked it. The father said nothing. Only half a year later, at a wholly settled time, he said to him gently: “Do you remember, child, how you gave us pork to eat one day when we were out in the fields? It was a Friday. Know that I ate it as though it were mushrooms.” Later, Saint Silouan would say of him: “There is an elder such as I would have wished to have. He never grew angry, he had a calm nature, ever gentle. Just think — he waited six months for the right moment to set me straight without wounding me.” Here is the measure of Christian rebuke: not its absence — for the father did, in the end, speak the truth — but the patience to choose the hour and the word by which correction enters without leaving a wound.
And Saint John says one more phrase that is a true synthesis of the whole of Christian pedagogy: “A young person whose education you neglect is like an untilled field on which many thorns grow.“ Education here is not schooling — it is the spiritual formation of the child. The field left unworked does not remain bare; it fills with weeds. So too the child’s soul: if you do not fill it with faith, virtue, prayer — it will fill itself with something else, and that something will not be blessed.
And about wealth as a danger for children, Saint John has severe words — directly applicable in our consumerist world: “Wealth generally has a harmful effect on children, leading them to neglect the important things of life.” The parent who raises his child in abundance, giving him everything he desires, without teaching him to bear lack, to work, to restrain himself — prepares him for a life of spiritual weakness. And this is not love; it is the other face of parental philautia — “let my child not suffer as I suffered.” It sounds beautiful, but it is poison.
Elder Paisios — “The Silent Reproach”
The third modern spiritual voice who speaks directly about raising children is Elder Paisios the Athonite (1924-1994), canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2015. Elder Paisios stressed one thing with a unique force: the power of example over words — what those who gathered his words called the “silent reproach” of parents.
He formulated this principle plainly: “For a correct Christian upbringing three things are needed: first, few words; second, many examples; and third, more prayer.” That is: in family life, what the child sees works more than what he hears. The parent who teaches the child not to lie, but himself lies on the telephone — loses the lesson. The parent who asks the child to pray, but himself does not pray — loses the lesson. The parent who asks the child to respect people, but himself despises his neighbours or his colleagues at work — loses the lesson. This is why Elder Paisios called blessed those parents who correct not by words but by life: “Blessed are the parents who do not use the word ‘no’ with their children, but restrain them from evil by their own holy life, which the children imitate, and so, joyfully, follow Christ with spiritual nobility.” The child receives all that he sees, without a filter.
This is why Elder Paisios said plainly: “Affection and love toward children are the basic conditions for their natural development.“ Not discipline, not correction, not lessons — but affection and love. Not those expressed in words, but those lived in the atmosphere of the home. The child who grows up in a home where he feels loved — loved for himself, not for his grades, not for how he meets parental expectations — that child will flourish naturally.
And the role of the mother in this process, according to Elder Paisios, is central — she is, to use an old image, the leaven that raises the whole family. Here is how he himself put it: “The mother comes to have more love and self-sacrifice than the father, because the father is given few occasions to sacrifice himself. The mother toils, she labours more with the children, but at the same time she ‘is charged’ with grace through her care for them. She gives continually, and therefore she also receives continually.”
This is a spiritual observation both terrible and beautiful at once. The mother, through the very daily labour she performs — the changing of nappies, the feeding, the sleepless nights, the patience with the smallest of the child’s troubles — is charged with grace. That is: what the modern world sees as a burden (“the woman obliged to stay with the children”) is, in the hidden economy of God, a source of sanctification greater than many monastic labours. On condition that it be done with love, not with grumbling.
Soft Wax — The First Window of Planting
There is a truth that every parent ought to know from the day the child is born: in the first years of life, the child’s soul is like soft wax. It receives easily, deeply, without resistance, any image impressed upon it. And this image, once imprinted, remains for the whole of life.
In the first years — up to about the age of seven to ten, when the child begins to open toward the outside world and toward his own judgement — the parents are, for him, everything. They are the centre of his world. They are the only people who admire him unconditionally, who love him without measure, who give meaning to his existence. Everything the parents do takes on, in the child’s eyes, an incontestable weight. Their word is truth. Their gesture is law. Their love is the air he breathes. In this first window, the child doubts nothing that comes from his parents — because he does not yet have an alternative world from which to judge.
This is why this is the age in which faith and love are most easily planted. Not through long lessons, not through constraint, but naturally — through the atmosphere of the home, through evening prayer made together, through going to the Liturgy held by the hand, through the kissed icon, through the sign of the cross made before the meal, through stories of the saints told at bedtime. The child receives them like a sponge that absorbs everything — without filter, without critical resistance, into the depths of his being.
Saint John Chrysostom saw this law clearly, sixteen centuries before modern psychology. “The souls of children are soft and tender; if good teachings are imprinted upon them from the very beginning, no one will be able to erase them, for with time they harden like a seal, as happens with wax. A soft thing takes any contour, because it has not yet acquired a settled form of its own.” And again: “Childhood, the earliest age, is precisely the most suitable time for the planting of either virtue or vice.” And further: “If you imprint good teachings upon his still-tender soul, no one will be able to detach them from him; they harden like the seal applied to wax.”
Here is the connection with the mystery of the hardening of the soul, of which we have spoken elsewhere. It is the same law of wax — but viewed from the other end. In the child, the wax is still soft and joyfully receives the image of Christ. In the hardened adult, the wax has set through the choices of decades, and no longer easily receives any new image. This is why what is not planted in time is far harder to plant later. The parent who postpones the child’s faith “until he grows up and chooses for himself” does not leave him freedom — he loses the window. For in the meantime the wax hardens; and the world, the screens, the company, the ideologies do not wait to imprint their own image.
If We Have Missed the Window — What We Can Still Do
But — and here we must be relentlessly honest — many parents read these lines too late. The children have already grown. The first window has passed. And the parent, looking back, sees clearly what he did not do: he was not the Christian model he should have been; he shouted when he should have kept silent; he was absent when he should have been present; he planted fear instead of love; he did not give the child faith at the time of the soft wax. And now the child is grown, estranged, perhaps far from the Church, perhaps withdrawn, perhaps gone.
What do we do then? We do not despair. For though the easy window has passed, the grace of God knows no closed windows. The later change is harder — but it is not impossible; for what is impossible for men is possible for God (cf. Luke 18:27). And the parent’s labour, even belated, remains real. Here is what we can do, however late:
Let us pray for them — unceasingly, with tears, without term. The parent’s prayer reaches the child’s soul where our words no longer have a way. As Saint Nonna prayed for her own, year after year, until God worked the change.
Let us bear with their faults with understanding — without repeating the first error of harshness. The grown child, wounded perhaps by a past of criticisms, needs first of all air, not a fresh demolition.
Let us criticise them no more — for each new criticism closes a door already half-open. Loving silence now works more than any word.
Let us win back the trust lost in us — patiently, through small deeds, through a constant and warm presence, through the unceasing proof that our love is not conditional. Trust is built slowly and with difficulty, but it can be built again.
Let us help them in their needs and troubles — without reproach, without “I told you so,” without reckoning. Help given in need, without conditions, speaks louder than any sermon about the love of Christ.
And, above all, let us now be the Christian model we were not when we should have been. It is never too late to change yourself. And the child — even grown, even estranged — sees the change in the parent. He sees the father who once shouted and now endures in silence. He sees the mother who once criticised and now prays. And that change, seen in the parent, can do more in the child’s soul than all the words of childhood. For all that the parent truly lives pours out, without words, into the child — at any age of the child, not only in the first.
The wax has hardened, yes. But the fire of grace can still soften it. And the hands of the parent who prays, endures, and loves to the end are one of the vessels through which God brings that fire.
Spiritual Refinement — The Sign of Authentic Love
Here we come to the central thesis of the article, which all the patristic voices above confirm and which overturns the entire authoritarian modern pedagogy.
Where there is authentic parental love, there is also spiritual refinement. True love is, by its nature, refined. It sees the child as a whole person, not as a possession. It senses his wounds, his weariness, his sorrow — even when the child does not say so. It waits for the right moment to speak. It chooses its words with care. It does not wound. It does not humiliate. It does not compare. It does not shout.
And conversely: where spiritual refinement is lacking, parental love can wound — when it is mixed with philautia, with fear, or with the desire for control. The shout, the demolishing criticism, the comparison with other children, the public humiliation, the blow — all these are blows struck in the name of love, however much the parent may claim to be doing “everything out of love.” Authentic love does not strike. Authentic love does not humiliate. Authentic love does not demand obedience through fear. For obedience won through fear will collapse on the first day the fear ceases.
Here is the very heart of the modern problem. Parents believe that authoritarianism is the expression of love — that is, “I love you so much that I correct you harshly.” The Tradition says exactly the opposite: authoritarianism is not love, but a wound of it — often fear or the desire for control, masked as concern. The truly loving parent has no need of shouts, blows, ultimatums. His love is felt without words — in his glances, in his touch, in the patience with which he listens, in the calm with which he receives the child when he comes home with bad news.
Saint Porphyrios formulated this refinement in a phrase that every parent ought to learn by heart: “Face all things with love, with kindness, with patience, and with humility.“ Four words. Love. Kindness. Patience. Humility. These are the four marks of spiritual refinement in the home. The parent who has them needs nothing else. The parent who does not, however many pedagogical techniques he may learn, will fail.
And spiritual refinement is seen above all in the hard moments. When the child comes home with a bad mark. When he lies. When he errs gravely. When he rejects the tradition of the family. Then it is seen whether the parent has authentic love or philautia. The self-loving parent explodes — shouts, strikes, threatens, cuts off privileges, withdraws affection as punishment. The truly loving parent remains in peace, listens, understands, speaks later — and never withdraws his love, not for a moment. For his love is not conditioned by the child’s behaviour. It flows unceasingly, like that of Christ toward us: when we are good, and above all when we are bad.
Three Living Icons of Christian Parental Love
Now, having established the patristic theory, let us see how it is lived in real life. The Tradition does not leave us with abstractions; it gives us living icons. And for our article we have chosen three saints recently canonised by the Church — all three of the twentieth century, all three with direct testimonies about the way they were loved and raised by their own parents. These testimonies are precious because they overturn, through concrete life, the entire authoritarian modern pedagogy. Saints are not born of shouts and beatings; they are born of love, gentleness, and prayer.
Mother Gavrilia Papayanni and Her Mother Victoria — The Love That Builds a Soul
Mother Gavrilia Papayanni (1897-1992), canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2023 as “Saint Gavrilia, the Ascetic of Love,” is one of the most luminous Orthodox voices of the last century. Born with the lay name Avrilia (Aurelia), she would receive the name Gavrilia only at her monastic tonsure. A Greek of Constantinople, a refugee in Greece after the population exchange of 1923, having become an orthopaedic practitioner in London, then serving the lepers of India, the mentally ill of the United States, the poor everywhere — without ever building a monastery, without seeking glory, crossing the world with a single Scripture and the clothes on her back. “The Ascetic of Love” — so she titled the book that is the confession of her life — for love was for her an ascetic labour, a daily struggle, an active sacrifice.
And that love which she gave to the world had its source in the love received at home, from her mother, Victoria Papayanni.
Mother Gavrilia spoke openly about her mother and about the whole family of her childhood, with a tenderness that surprises the reader familiar with the classical hagiographies, which are more reticent on this dimension. Fifty years after her mother’s death, asked where the tireless love came from with which she embraced everyone — lepers, the mentally ill, the poor everywhere — Mother Gavrilia answered with astonishing clarity:
“If things are so, it is because, in spite of the many hardships I have passed through in my life, I feel that I have been — as we all are — the beloved child of God. Besides this, being the youngest child at home, my family loved me very much: my mother, my father, my brother, and my two sisters. Through their love and example, I too learned to love.“
Here is the direct testimony of a loved child — become, through that love, a saint. Mother Gavrilia does not speak of an abstract spiritual education; she speaks of being loved. And she acknowledges plainly that the love she gave to the world is the love she received at home. And she added, in the continuation of the same answer, the observation that overturns the entire modern pedagogy:
“Imagine that I became obedient — though I was not so by nature — because I did not want to grieve them, and because I realised that what they expected of me was a good thing.”
This is exactly what we built theologically in the first article of the triad: true obedience is born of love, not of fear. Mother Gavrilia was — by her own testimony — a disobedient nature by birth. And yet she became obedient. Not because she was forced, not because she feared punishment, but because she did not want to grieve the parents she loved, and because she understood that what they asked of her was a good thing.
Here is authentic Christian obedience: not the kind wrung out by fear, but the kind born of love — love first received, then returned.
And Mother Gavrilia herself offered the exact diagnosis of the modern crisis which we opened in the first paragraphs of this article. Here is how her spiritual daughter preserved this word:
“When parents do not give their children all their love, or when they have no love for one another, they cannot expect their poor children to be good and obedient. These children may come to have troubles, may associate with unsuitable people, may become entangled with drugs or other harmful things.”
These words, preserved by the one who gathered her life and her words, are more powerful than any modern sociological study. Mother Gavrilia saw, with the gaze of holiness, the root of the contemporary adolescent crisis: the lack of authentic parental love. Not the lack of money, not the lack of opportunities, not the lack of private lessons — the lack of love for the child as a person, and of love between the parents themselves.
And about her mother, Victoria, Mother Gavrilia had words that deserve to be read and reread by every Christian mother. On 24 March 1954, the day of her mother’s death, Mother Gavrilia would say later, in her letters:
“From the day I was born, my guiding inspiration, the force that shaped me, was my mother — a being of immeasurable love. The richness and intensity of this love and the constant influence of her example, full of light, made me love God more and more, and all people and all things.“
Here is the very heart of Christian parental love, formulated by the one who received it. The constant influence of an example full of light. Not sermons. Not lessons. Not impositions. Example, light, unceasing love — this is what makes a child grow up loving: God, all people, and all things.
And at each parting, when Mother Gavrilia would leave for a few months or years — for studies in Switzerland, in London, on various missions — her mother would say to her the same words, until the last day of her life:
“Go, my child. I will wait for you! Do not worry. Go!“
How many modern parents give you these words? “Go, my child. Do not worry.” Most hold the child back, burden him with worries, with unspoken obligations, with guilt. The authentic Christian parent, like Victoria Papayanni, sets the child free — sends him into life without holding him with chains of affection. For real love does not possess; it sets free.
Her mother’s death, in 1954, was the turning point of Mother Gavrilia’s life. Here is how she described that day: “The day of our parting, the day of my inner crisis, severed the last bond that still kept me attached to a normal, material life on this earth. All at once, I died… I died to the world.” Mother Gavrilia kept vigil all night, beneath a blinding light that radiated from the icon of Christ. And in that night she received the call — India. She would close her practice, give away all her goods to the poor, and depart, at almost sixty years of age, with only the clothes on her back and a Scripture.
Of her mother’s role in this path, Mother Gavrilia wrote later, with a stirring clarity: “My mother was the one who had opened the way for me — my mother who had been my link with the love of God, my counsellor, my guide in difficulties.”
This is, in the end, the ultimate mission of every Christian parent: to be for his child the link with the love of God. Not only a material caretaker, not only an educator, not only a protector — but the way to God. The parent who raises his child in such a way that, at the end of his life, the child can say “my mother / my father was my link with the love of God” — that parent has fulfilled his Christian calling. The rest — the child’s career, his earthly success, social approval — are additions.
And this final gesture, this “link with the love of God,” does not come out of nowhere. It comes from the long years of daily love received, from “the constant influence of an example full of light,” from the words spoken a thousand times at each parting: “Go, my child. I will wait for you!” Mother Gavrilia shows us what an authentic Christian home means: a home in which love flows without calculation, in which the child feels received as he is, in which each day is a lesson of silent love.
Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia and His Father Leonidas — The Authentic Sacrifice of a Father
Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906-1991), canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2013, is one of the great Orthodox elders of the twentieth century. He too spoke of his childhood, but with a characteristic discretion. And for our theme, the childhood of Saint Porphyrios gives us a unique piece: the image of the sacrificial father.
Saint Porphyrios was born in a poor village on the island of Evia, Agios Ioannis Karystias, in 1906. He was the fourth of the five children of the family of Leonidas and Eleni Bairaktaris. His father Leonidas was a chanter at the village church — and, more than that, he was a disciple of Saint Nektarios of Aegina, whom he often accompanied on his travels. That is, this child, the future great Athonite elder, grew up in a home where faith was lived daily — in a father who was close to a living saint, who accompanied Saint Nektarios on services and journeys, who chanted daily at the church of his village.
And this faithful father made a sacrifice that our times rarely understand any more. Here is how Saint Porphyrios himself tells it: “My father, since we were poor, had gone to America, to work on the Panama Canal, for us, his children.“
A few words that say everything: for us, his children. Leonidas, a faithful man, a disciple of Saint Nektarios, parted from his family for years, crossed the ocean, laboured on one of the harshest construction sites of the modern world — the Panama Canal, in murderous climatic conditions, alongside thousands of workers who died of yellow fever and malaria — so that his five children might have bread on the table at home.
This is the authentic parental sacrifice of which the Tradition speaks. Not an emotional sacrifice, but a real one. Not a “I gave you all I could” spoken with reproach, but a carrying of the cross in silence, without the children ever hearing a single reproach. Leonidas did not make his children emotional debtors through sacrifice — he did his duty as a parent, and kept silent.
And the child Evangelos, the son of this father, grew up with the icon of this sacrifice before his eyes. He himself worked from the age of seven — first in a shop in Halkidiki, then at a grocery in Piraeus, then in the mines. And he read, spelling out with difficulty, the life of Saint John the Hut-Dweller. “While I was tending the cattle,” he recounted, “I read, spelling it out, the life of Saint John the Hut-Dweller. And I came to love him much.” At twelve or thirteen he left alone, in secret, for Athos. He became one of the greatest Orthodox elders of the twentieth century, endowed with the gift of foresight and of healings.
Here is the lesson for modern parents. It is not mere physical presence that guarantees Christian fatherhood; what builds the child is living faith, sacrifice without reproach, and the inner image the parent leaves in his soul. Leonidas was not beside his children for years. But he was the bearer of a living faith, the disciple of a saint, a real sacrificer. And the children grew up seeing and knowing this, without its being told them in words. This is the difference between authentic sacrifice and the modern “sacrifice”: the first is done in silence, without reproach, for the children — and produces saints. The second is done with grumbling, with reckoning, with “look what I have done for you” — and produces children who flee from home.
The contemporary Christian parent, if he truly wishes to love his children, must ask himself not “what have I given them materially,” but “what living faith have they seen in me? What saint have I known, whom I have brought into their lives? What silent sacrifice have I made, which I have never reproached them with?”
Saint Paisios the Athonite and His Father Prodromos — The Reversal of Beating as Pedagogy
And the third living icon gives us the clearest answer to the popular formula “a beating comes from Paradise” — and gives it from the very mouth of the family of the most well-known Athonite saint of the twentieth century.
Saint Paisios the Athonite (1924-1994), canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2015, was born in the village of Farasa in Cappadocia, on the day of the dormition of Saint Anna. His father was named Prodromos and was “the leader of the inhabitants of Farasa” — a man respected in his community. His mother was named Eulogia (in Konitsa, after the displacement of 1924, she was called Eulampia). The family was related to Saint Arsenios the Cappadocian, who also baptised the infant Arsenios with his own name.
We have an extraordinarily precious testimony about the way Prodromos raised his children — coming directly from Saint Paisios’ siblings, Christina and Raphael, asked once by a priest who knew them:
“Once, I put the following question to his siblings, Christina and Raphael: ‘When you were small children and made childish mischief, did your father beat you?’ They answered me: ‘No. He never beat us, but he would say to us: “May God enlighten you, my child, that you may understand your fault.”‘ I admired the wise upbringing that the father of Father Paisios gave his children. In this way he cultivated reverence toward God and love among them.”
Here is the direct answer, from the mouth of those who lived their childhood beside a future saint. His father never beat them. This faithful man, the leader of the village, a man respected in his Christian community, never used beating as a method of education — and yet from his home came good children, one of whom was recognised by the Church as a holy monastic saint.
And the formula of correction that Prodromos used is of a pure Christianity: “May God enlighten you, my child, that you may understand your fault.” Here is the whole of Orthodox pedagogy in a single sentence. Three things in nine words:
“May God enlighten you” — the father is not the ultimate judge of the child; God is. The father acknowledges his own limitation, his own inability to force the child’s understanding. Only God can give light. And the father prays for this.
“My child” — the relationship remains intact. Even in the moment of correction, the child remains the son. He is not demoted, not rejected, does not lose his status. Love flows unceasingly.
“That you may understand your fault” — the goal is not punishment, but understanding. The father does not want the son to fear beating for the future — he wants the son to understand what he did wrong, so that he can freely choose the good next time. This is Christian freedom, the opposite of constraint.
And about his mother Eulogia we have still more direct testimonies of Saint Paisios himself, about the way she taught him. Here are a few:
“My mother taught me not to be proud in games, not to want to be first. She said that it was the same whether I came first or last.”
“She taught me self-restraint: not to eat before mealtime. And the breaking of this rule she considered a kind of intemperance.”
“My mother, when she wanted to tell someone something, said it using parables, like the Saviour.”
Here is what Eulogia conveyed to the child Arsenios, from his earliest childhood: humility (not to want to be first), self-restraint (not to eat on a whim), and pedagogical wisdom through parables — that is, not through direct imposition, not through shouts, not through dry lessons, but through images, through stories, like the Saviour Himself in the Gospel. This is spiritual refinement in its pure state.
And the child Arsenios received this work, interiorised it, and became over the course of his life the most well-known Athonite elder of modern times — recognised also by the Church, through canonisation, only twenty years after his death.
Here the saying “a beating comes from Paradise” is definitively shattered. The parents of a canonised saint did not beat their children. They raised them with words like “May God enlighten you, my child.” They taught them humility, self-restraint, the love of God — through parables, through example, through silence, through prayer. And they raised saints.
The contemporary Christian parent who still believes that beating is Christian pedagogy has here the clearest answer the Church herself can give him, through the recent canonisation of Saint Paisios: beating does not give birth to saints. Love, patience, prayer, the silent example — these give birth to them.
Practical Pastoral Care — When the Child Does Not Obey
In saying all this, we are not naive. We know that in real life hard moments come. The child misbehaves. The child withdraws into himself. The child skips his lessons. The child lies. The child begins to keep bad company. The child abandons the faith in adolescence. The child wants to leave home.
What does the Christian parent do in such moments? The Tradition gives us four fundamental labours, parallel to those we saw in the previous article on the storms of marriage.
First: silence. Before any word, silence. The child in crisis, the rebellious child, the withdrawn child — does not receive words spoken in anger or in panic. He rejects them instinctively. “Words strike the ears,” said Saint Porphyrios. Therefore: the first reaction of the Christian parent is not to speak, but to be silent. To withdraw into himself. To ask himself: “What has happened? Why has he come to this? What have I done? What have I failed to do?” This silence is not indifference; it is discernment.
Then: prayer. Saint Porphyrios said: “What you have to say, say it through prayer. Go to the Mother of God and let her do the work.” This is the most powerful labour of the Christian parent. More powerful than all sermons, all ultimatums, all threats. The mother who prays for her child all night — as Saint Nonna prayed for her husband and her children — works at the foundation of the child’s soul where her words cannot reach. And God works. Later, or sooner, but He works.
Then: example. For what the parent lives is imparted to the child without words — “words strike the ears, whereas prayer goes to the heart,” said Saint Porphyrios. The parent who wants the child to change must change himself. The parent who wants a praying child must himself be a praying parent. The parent who wants a patient child must himself endure without grumbling. This labour is slow, but it is the only one that succeeds. For Christian pedagogy is not a technique; it is a life.
And at the last: speech, but little, and with gentleness. Only after silence, prayer, and example have done their work — and only when the child is settled, open, disposed to listen — does the word come. And it is not a word of reproach, not a word of demolition, not a long sermon. It is a short, simple word, full of love. As Prodromos, the father of Saint Paisios, used to say: “May God enlighten you, my child, that you may understand your fault.” That is all. The rest God does.
And when the child has fallen gravely — has embraced grave passions, has departed from the Church, has shut himself away for years — Elder Paisios teaches us never to despair. “Not even the gravest fall of children should make parents despair.” The parent’s prayer has a hidden power, which the world does not see, but God sees. And God, in His own time, works. Some prayers are fulfilled only after the parent’s death. But not one is lost.
Conclusion: The Triad Is Completed
The holy Apostle Paul wrote: “This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:32). The Christian family is a great mystery — for it is the icon of the relationship of Christ and the Church. And in an icon, each element has its place: the head who gives his life for those he leads, the receiving heart who honours him with love, and the children — the fruit of love — who learn by seeing, who grow up receiving love, who give their own lives in turn for their own.
The triad is completed. Order + conjugal love + parental love. These three are the Christian family — the little church, in the expression of Saint John Chrysostom. Where one of the three is lacking, the whole collapses. Where all three are present, the home becomes a living icon of the Kingdom.
To the Christian father, a single word: love. Do not control, do not intimidate, do not strike. Love sacrificially, like Christ. Let your child see you praying. Let him see you living the faith, not merely speaking about it. Let him see you bearing injustice without grumbling. Let him see you honouring his mother, more than anything else in the world. And pray for him daily. The rest God will work.
To the Christian mother, a single word: pray. You are the leaven that raises the whole family. Your silent, unceasing, love-filled labour is the labour that will sanctify the whole family. Do not exhaust yourself in criticisms, in reproaches, in noise. Pray. And be present — with gentleness, with patience, with refinement. At each parting, say to your child what Victoria said to Mother Gavrilia: “Go, my child. I will wait for you! Do not worry.” And he, feeling your unceasing love behind him, will be able to go anywhere in the world — and will always return toward God.
To those who have children in the storm — rebellious, withdrawn, gone, estranged — four words: be silent, pray, endure, love. Do not break the bond by immediate reaction. The sea can grow calm. The fisherman waits. And God, in His mysterious economy, works in your child where your word can no longer reach. “Love draws the grace of God,” said Saint Porphyrios. And grace, when it does not immediately change the other, sanctifies the one who endures and prepares the ground for the moment of change.
The Christian family is not an institution. It is a daily labour, slow, humble — a way toward the Kingdom. And the children who have seen this labour in their home, even if they fall, even if they leave, even if they forget — will remember. And they will return. For nothing that we have planted with authentic love, in peace and prayer, is lost unto the ages.
Reference Sources
Holy Scripture. The biblical citations (Ephesians 6:1-4; Colossians 3:20-21; Matthew 11:29; Luke 18:27; Proverbs 13:24; the parable of the prodigal son — Luke 15:11-32) are rendered after the Synodal Bible.
Saint John Chrysostom. The citations on the raising of children and on the duty of parents come from the treatise On Vainglory and the Upbringing of Children. In particular: “When you see that fear has had good results, be gentle. Human nature has need also of gentleness”; “Raise an athlete for Christ!”; “A young person whose education you neglect is like an untilled field on which many thorns grow.” For the section on the tender age (soft wax): “The souls of children are soft and tender; if good teachings are imprinted upon them from the very beginning, no one will be able to erase them, for with time they harden like a seal, as happens with wax. A soft thing takes any contour, because it has not yet acquired a settled form of its own”; “Childhood, the earliest age, is precisely the most suitable time for the planting of either virtue or vice”; “If you imprint good teachings upon his still-tender soul, no one will be able to detach them from him; they harden like the seal applied to wax.”
Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia (1906-1991, canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 27 November 2013). The citations on the education of children and the testimony about his father Leonidas — “My father, since we were poor, had gone to America, to work on the Panama Canal, for us, his children” — come from the volumes of his collected words and life. His father Leonidas was a chanter in the village church on Evia and a disciple of Saint Nektarios of Aegina.
Elder Paisios the Athonite (1924-1994, canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 13 January 2015). The citations come mainly from the fourth volume of the Spiritual Counsels — Family Life — and from the official life of the saint. The expression “the silent reproach” of parents, as well as the formulation “affection and love toward children are the basic conditions for their natural development,” appear in the preface of the volume Family Life. The citation about the child who wants to leave home (“I myself could not bear to stay with you a single hour…”) and the one about the mother who “is charged with grace through her care for the children” are from the same volume. The warning that “not even the gravest fall of children should make parents despair” is likewise recorded among the Elder’s words on the family. The word about parental tenderness — “the caresses of parents give children self-confidence and help them to face the difficulties of life” — comes from the same volume. The observation that the problems of the modern family spring from the distancing of people from God and from their self-love is recorded in the presentation of the volume Family Life, as a background theme of the Elder’s teaching on the family. The testimony of the siblings Christina and Raphael about their father Prodromos — “He never beat us, but he would say to us: ‘May God enlighten you, my child, that you may understand your fault'” — is recorded in the published life. The testimonies of Saint Paisios about his mother Eulogia (the teachings on humility, self-restraint, pedagogy through parables) are contained in the official biography. The image of the mother as “the leaven that raises the whole family” is a summary formulation, not a word-for-word citation.
Mother Gavrilia Papayanni (1897-1992, canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 3 October 2023). The autobiographical citations in this article are rendered after the book The Ascetic of Love — the biography and words of Mother Gavrilia gathered by her last spiritual daughter. Most are words spoken by herself (answers given, notes, letters), and one is preserved in the rendering of her spiritual daughter, as is noted in the text. In particular: the testimony about her childhood family (direct word) — “My family loved me very much: my mother, my father, my brother, and my two sisters. Through their love and example, I too learned to love”; the diagnosis of the modern crisis (in the spiritual daughter’s rendering) — “When parents do not give their children all their love, or when they have no love for one another, they cannot expect their poor children to be good and obedient; these children… may become entangled with drugs or other harmful things”; the description of her mother Victoria — “My guiding inspiration, the force that shaped me, was my mother — a being of immeasurable love”; the mother’s words at each parting — “Go, my child. I will wait for you! Do not worry”; the reflection after her mother’s death (24 March 1954) — “My mother was the one who had opened the way for me — my mother who had been my link with the love of God, my counsellor, my guide in difficulties.”
The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). Invoked in the diagnostic section as an answer to the objection that even the beloved child may leave home: true love does not imprison the freedom of the other, and the son returns precisely because he carries within him the memory of the parental home.
Saint Parascheva of Iași (eleventh century, Epivat/Thrace). The episode invoked in the section on beating — at ten years old, hearing the evangelical word in church, she gave her good clothes to a poor man, dressing herself in his; the synaxarion records that “she did the same on other occasions as well, paying no heed to the rebukes of her parents,” and later, distributing her share of the inheritance to the poor, she left her parental home. The parents’ reaction is named in the liturgical sources (synaxarion, Akathist) “rebuke” and “scolding”; some more recent accounts speak of harsher punishments, including beating. One tradition presents the parents as themselves devout and merciful, who gave her a Christian upbringing (her brother, Euthymios, became a bishop). Used as an illustration of the fact that, in the lives of the saints, parental harshness in childhood appears as an injustice suffered for the Gospel, not as a useful pedagogy.
Father Cleopa Ilie (1912-1998). The words on self-love as the source of all evil — “The source of all evil and of every sin, and the root of all wickedness, is self-love, which is an irrational love of the body and is the heaviest and most subtle of all the passions that enslave human nature” and its linking to self-denial as “the greatest virtue, which leads a man to holiness and to Paradise” — are recorded in the Romanian Paterikon of Archimandrite Ioanichie Bălan and taken up in the life of Father Cleopa. Father Cleopa takes the definition of philautia from Saint Maximus the Confessor (“an irrational love of the body”).
The proverb “a beating comes from Paradise.” The expression does not appear in Holy Scripture. Its application as a Christian pedagogical method is contradicted by the patristic testimony (Saint John Chrysostom), by the Pauline commandment of Ephesians 6:4 and Colossians 3:21 (“do not provoke your children, lest they be discouraged”), and by the living testimony of the families of recently canonised saints — in particular the family of Saint Paisios the Athonite.
Saint Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938, canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1987). The episode about his father — who, seeing that pork had been eaten on a Friday through carelessness, said nothing and only half a year later told it gently to his son — as well as the saint’s words about him (“he waited six months for the right moment to set me straight without wounding me”) are recorded in the biography written by his disciple, Saint Sophrony Sakharov, Saint Silouan the Athonite (the chapter on his childhood and youth). Of his father, Saint Silouan spoke as a model of gentleness and wisdom, “an elder such as I would have wished to have.”
Saint Nonna, mother of Saint Gregory the Theologian. Mentioned in the pastoral section for the example of the mother who, through long prayer and luminous example, obtained the return of her husband to the true faith (and his ordination as bishop), as well as the growth in holiness of her children. Attested in the Orations of Saint Gregory the Theologian (Oration 18, On the Death of His Father).