Chesterton on raising children and "dangerous toys"

The set of quotes in this recent spate of posts come from an edited volume by Alvaro de Silva called "Brave New Family".

Chesterton wrestles with a key question within the potential wisdom and courage of parenting: how should one handle vs. personally avoid vs. socially prohibit things that can be dangerous.

Now the first and most self-evident truth is that, of all the things a child sees and touches, the most dangerous toy is about the least dangerous thing. There is hardly a single domestic utensil that is not much more dangerous than a little bow and arrow. He can burn himself in the fire, he can boil himself in the bath, he can cut his throat with the carving-knife, he can scald himself with the kettle, he can choke himself with anything small enough, he can break his neck off anything high enough. He moves all day long amid a murderous machinery, as capable of killing and maiming as the wheels of the most frightful factory....And while he thus dances in the shadow of death, he is to be saved from all the perils of possessing a piece of string, tied to a bent bough or twig.

...the amount of damage he could conceivably do with his little arrows would be about one hundredth part of the damage that he could always in any case have done by simply picking up a stone in the garden.

Now you do not keep a little boy from throwing stones by preventing him from ever seeing stones. You do not do it by locking up all the stones in the Geological Museum, and only issuing tickets of admission to adults. You do not do it by trying to pick up all the pebbles on the beach, for fear he should practise throwing them into the sea....You do it by trying to preserve some reasonable authority and influence over the child. You trust to your private relation with the boy, and not to your public relation with the stone....If you can teach a child not to throw a stone, you can teach him when to shoot an arrow...If his training deters him from heaving half a brick at the postman, it will probably also warn him against constantly loosening shafts of death against the policeman.... (Fancies Versus Fads, Chapter 13)

It's interesting that the Scriptural focus on parenting is on discipline. But good training is implied and even made explicit in Dt 6:6-9, Pr 6:20-23, and Pr 22:6. Back in the day, training was a relatively easy part of life-- as parent and child lived life together. Today, it requires a more purposeful approach to parenting.