The Education of Children

One of St. Porphyrios’s most loved and most practical teachings: his counsels on raising children. Against an upbringing of fear, scolding, pressure, and constant lecturing — which he believed forms children badly and provokes them to later rebellion — he set the conviction that what truly sanctifies a child is the holiness and love of the parents. The parents are to become saints, especially in their gentleness, patience, and love; to pray for the child rather than nag at it; and to raise it in joy and freedom, so that it grows toward Christ from within rather than in revolt against a religion imposed by coercion.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

What Truly Forms a Child

St. Porphyrios’s teaching on raising children rests on a single, searching conviction that he stated again and again: what saves children and makes them good is not pressure applied to the children, but the life of the parents. “What saves and makes for good children is the life of the parents in the home,” he taught. “The parents need to devote themselves to the love of God. They need to become saints in their relation to their children through their mildness, patience, and love” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “The upbringing of children”; widely circulated, e.g., orthodoxytoday.org).

The reorientation here is total, and it is the family-application of his whole teaching (see Wounded by Love). Most anxious parents direct their energy at the child — correcting, pressing, instructing, disciplining. St. Porphyrios redirects that energy back onto the parents themselves: become holy, become loving, and the child will be formed by the atmosphere of holiness and love it grows up in, more surely than by any amount of direct intervention. The child absorbs what the parents are far more than what they say. The way to raise a saint is to become one.

The Harm of Fear, Scolding, and Pressure

St. Porphyrios was unusually frank about the damage done by the wrong kind of parental zeal. He warned against excessive scolding, anger, harshness, and pressure, and he insisted — with the psychological acuity that marks all his teaching — that a child perceives a parent’s inner state regardless of outward restraint: “Even if you don’t scold the child outwardly but bristle with anger inwardly or look fiercely at the child, the child understands” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “The upbringing of children”). The child reads the parent’s heart, not merely the parent’s words.

He went so far as to lay the blame for much of children’s bad behavior on the parents: “Generally the parents are to blame for the bad behaviour of the children. And their behaviour is not improved by reprimands, disciplining, or strictness” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love). And he warned that constant lecturing, especially when it is not backed by prayer and love, becomes a kind of intimidation that the child will eventually rebel against: “If you do not communicate through prayer, constant lecturing becomes a kind of intimidation. And when the child grows up it begins to rebel — that is, to take revenge, so to speak, on its father and mother who coerced it” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love; circulated via novoscriptorium.com, orthodoxchurch.sg). The rebellion of the grown child, in his analysis, is often the delayed recoil from a childhood of coercion.

Prayer Instead of Nagging

In place of nagging, scolding, and pressure, St. Porphyrios set prayer. The most effective thing a parent can do for a child, in his teaching, is not to lecture the child but to pray for the child — to entrust the child to God and to the Mother of God, to speak to the child’s soul through prayer rather than only to the child’s ears through words (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Praying for our children”; orthochristian.com/91192.html). He taught a kind of secret, prayerful communication of the parent’s love and faith to the child — a love that reaches the child at a depth no scolding can — and he held that this silent, prayerful influence accomplishes what reprimand never can. “What is not expressed generally has greater power than words” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love) — a saying with direct application here: the unspoken, prayerful, loving atmosphere of a holy home forms a child more powerfully than any amount of spoken correction.

The Love Between the Parents

St. Porphyrios located the deepest root of a child’s well-being in the love between the parents themselves. The first and most formative gift parents give a child is not their instruction but their mutual love and their shared love of Christ; a home filled with that love is the soil in which a child grows healthy and turns naturally toward God (Wounded by Love, “The upbringing of children”; orthodoxytoday.org, “Parents’ Love for Christ and Each Other Makes for Good Children”). A child raised amid the parents’ love for each other and for God receives, before any lesson, the lived experience of love — and it is that experience, far more than any catechesis, that opens the child to the love of Christ. Conversely, no amount of religious instruction can compensate a child for a home without love.

The Limits and the Realism of the Teaching

It would be a misreading to take St. Porphyrios’s counsels as a doctrine of permissiveness — as though he taught that children should never be corrected and that all discipline is harmful. That is not his point, and his own realism guards against it. His target is specifically the wrong spirit of correction: the anger, the harshness, the constant nagging, the coercion that intimidates and provokes rebellion. He is not against guidance, structure, or even correction as such; he is against correction that flows from a parent’s own unquiet, ungentle, unprayerful heart, and that therefore wounds rather than forms. A correction given in genuine love, calmly and rarely, from a parent who has first prayed, is a very different thing from the anxious, angry, repeated reprimand he warns against.

His realism shows, too, in his honesty about the parents’ own state. He does not flatter parents; he tells them, bluntly, that the children’s faults are usually traceable to the parents themselves, and that the remedy must begin there — in the parents’ own repentance, prayer, and growth in love. This is a demanding teaching, not a soft one: it puts the whole weight of responsibility on the adults’ own holiness rather than on techniques applied to the child. A parent who wants a method to fix the child will not find one in St. Porphyrios; what he offers instead is harder and deeper — become holy, become loving, become prayerful, and your child will be formed by what you are. The teaching is gentle toward children precisely because it is so demanding toward parents.

Finally, his confidence that a child raised in love and prayer will “grow toward Christ of its own accord” is not a guarantee that overrides the child’s own freedom — Orthodox theology never denies the freedom even of a child to choose against God. It is, rather, a statement of where the odds lie, and of where the parents’ energy is best spent: not in coercing a particular outcome, which they cannot finally control, but in creating the atmosphere of holiness and love in which the child is most likely, freely, to turn toward Christ. The parents sow; God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6); the child, in freedom, responds — and the best thing the parents can do is to make the soil good.

Raised in Joy, Not Fear

The sum of St. Porphyrios’s child-rearing teaching is that children should be raised in joy and freedom, not in fear. The atmosphere he prescribes is the atmosphere of his whole teaching: love rather than coercion, prayer rather than pressure, the beauty and wonder of creation (see Nature, Poetry, and Science) rather than a religion of prohibitions and threats. He wanted children to come to love Christ freely, from the inside, drawn by the love and holiness they had grown up surrounded by — not driven toward Him by guilt and fear, which produces only later rebellion. A child raised in joy, in a home of love and prayer, will (in his confidence) grow toward Christ of its own accord, just as a flower turns toward the sun.

This is, once again, the garden of the soul applied to the family: do not fight the child’s faults head-on; do not water the weeds with anxious attention; cultivate love, holiness, and joy in the home, and the good will grow. It is the same teaching, all the way down — and it is the form in which St. Porphyrios has perhaps most widely entered the practical life of Orthodox families, who find in him not a stern moralist but a tender advocate for raising children in the love and joy of Christ.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. The chapter on the upbringing of children: the holiness of the parents; mildness, patience, and love; the harm of scolding, anger, and lecturing-as-intimidation; prayer over reprimand; the love between the parents; “what is not expressed has greater power than words.”
“Parents’ Love for Christ and Each Other Makes for Good Children.” orthodoxytoday.org. The teaching that the parents’ holiness and mutual love form the child.
“Praying for Our Children.” OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/91192.html). His counsel to pray for children rather than pressure them.
Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia: On the Upbringing of Children. novoscriptorium.com; and orthodoxchurch.sg, “Saint Porphyrios Advises the Parents and Teachers How to Treat the Young.” The teaching against coercion and on raising children in love.