If you are responsible for your children, then you have to figure out how to program them to make the “right” choices. And you need to do it quickly. You have to learn the right techniques to get them to think, feel, and behave according to your definition of “good.”

All of this sounds alarmingly like obedience training. It comes as no surprise, then, to find parenting books at your local bookseller written by animal trainers. “What works for Fido can work for your child!”

If you’re totally responsible for coercing your children into being good, then it makes perfect sense to enlist some program or system like that. I, for one, cannot imagine our Creator wants us to treat children like animals. Such an approach may make parents feel big and in charge, but it leaves children feeling small and incompetent. This is certainly not the way our heavenly Father deals with us.

The fact that our children have been given the power of choice, as self-directed human beings, can thwart even the best obedience-training program. Children will soon realize they are in a no-win situation. Either they kill their own decision-making spirit in an attempt to reduce their parents’ anxiety, or they rebel against their parents’ authority. That’s the catch-22 of the “responsible for” model of parenting.

Parents either program their children correctly or they have failed. Children either conform to the system, surrender their individuality, and become “the child we don’t have to worry about,” or they rebel against the system, failing to “get with the program.”

Do you see the two categories we have neatly set up? On one hand, we have “What Will Make Mom and Dad Less Anxious,” and on the other hand, we have “Wrong Choices That Will Make Mom and Dad More Anxious.” For most families, there simply is no third option.

In this system, the possibility of children learning to act for themselves and think critically about their choices does not exist. Doing so would equal rebellion. If your child ends up “doing the right thing,” then you’ve raised a robot. He did exactly as he was programmed to do. But if your child ends up thinking and acting for himself, then you’ve raised a rebel.

There Is a Better Way

But there has to be another way—a way to say yes to our profound influence on our children’s lives without taking total responsibility for those lives. There must be a way to dramatically influence the life of a child without resorting to programming and coercion. I call this third option Scream-Free Parenting, because it emphasizes a radical focus on and approach to calming our own anxiety.

Again, not all of us scream at our children, but all of us struggle with reactive behaviors. We may scream, we may manipulate, we may even use violence. Or we may neglect, we may avoid, we may even withhold love. These are all different examples of emotional reactivity.