A God-Centred Home
Here’s a snippet from John Barach’s review of Lou Priolo’s The Heart of Anger: Practical Help for the Prevention and Cure of Anger in Children:
Priolo presents two family models, inviting you to determine which one best matches your family.
The first one is the “Child-Centered Home.” In this home, children are allowed to interrupt adults, use manipulation to get their way, dictate the family schedule, demand excessive time and attention, escape consequences of their sins, be coddled (rather than disciplined) out of a bad mood, and so forth. Priolo writes: “A child-centered home is one in which a child believes and is allowed to behave as though the entire household, parents, siblings, and even pets exist for one purpose — to please him” (24).
The second one is the “God-Centered Home.” In this home, “everyone is committed to pleasing and serving God. God’s desires are exalted over everyone else’s” (27). This home, as Priolo presents it, doesn’t permit the sort of behavior the child-centered home allows. Instead, the children are taught to joyfully serve others, obey parents the first time and do so cheerfully, adapt to the parents’ schedule, and so on.
Here’s what jumped out at me. You might expect that the opposite of a child-centered home would be a parent-centered home, but Priolo spends no time at all on that possible family model.
