There's a scene early in Starship Troopers that stopped me cold. Mr. Dubois, Rico's History and Moral Philosophy teacher, is responding to a student who objects to corporal punishment. Dubois makes his case plainly: a child who misbehaves is no different from a dog that soils the carpet. You don't reason with a dog. You swat it, because that's the only language that registers. Moral sense, he argues, isn't natural to human beings. It has to be installed from the outside, through pain and reward, the same way you train an animal.
I have four kids under ten. I read that passage and felt something sharpen in me, because Dubois isn't entirely wrong, and that's what makes him worth taking seriously.
He's right that children need discipline. He's right that the culture of endless permissiveness produces weak, self-absorbed adults. Discipline does shape character, and Rico proves it. The boy who enlisted to impress a girl becomes a man willing to die for his brothers. That transformation is real.
But there is something Dubois's framework can never reach, and I think about it every day as a father. He looks at a child and sees an animal to be conditioned. I keep coming back to a different image entirely: Jesus in Matthew 19, when the disciples are shooing children away and he stops them. "Let the children come to me." He takes them in his arms and blesses them. That is not how you look at an animal. That is how you look at someone who belongs to God.
The Church teaches that "the human person participates in the light and power of the divine Spirit. By his reason, he is capable of understanding the order of things established by the Creator" (CCC 1704). My children are not blank slates to be written on from the outside. They come into this world with something already written on their hearts. St. Paul says it plainly: "The work of the law is written on their hearts" (Romans 2:15). There is something in them, in all of us, that already knows, however dimly, the difference between love and cruelty, between justice and selfishness. They bear the image of God. More than that: they exist because God delighted in the idea of them. His love for that idea was so abundant it burst forth into a person. That is where they begin.
Original sin clouds that knowledge. It weakens the will and amplifies the passions. That's exactly why discipline matters — not as a grudging concession, but as an act of love. I know what it feels like to be disciplined toward convenience rather than holiness, and I am determined my children won't. I owe them the hard work of formation. I owe them consistency, consequences, and the willingness to hold the line when they push back. But the goal of that discipline is never compliance. The goal is the full flourishing of what God already placed in them, and that flourishing has a name and a face. It looks like Jesus Christ, which is something I'll come back to.
Here is where knowing what my children are changes not just the why of discipline but the how. If what I'm trying to draw out is something God placed there, then I cannot draw it out through pressure alone. Grace responds to love, not force. Children aren't responding to stimuli anyway — they're responding to you, to your presence, your witness, your failures, your joy. And you cannot coerce virtue. You can coerce behavior, but virtue has to be freely chosen, and love, which is the whole goal, cannot be compelled at all. God himself doesn't compel it. He woos, he invites, he lays down his life, but he never forces.
Which means the entire enterprise has to be rooted in invitation, in relationship, in witness. Dubois is trying to build compliant citizens. I am trying to raise children who freely choose to love God and neighbor. My life has to be the argument, and that is a far more demanding standard than running a tight ship.
This kind of knowing can't be delegated. It requires presence, and the accumulation of ten thousand ordinary moments together. I think about my nine-year-old son, who is stubborn in exactly the way I was at nine, who needs to be pushed differently than his brother, who closes down when I raise my voice but opens right up when I get quiet and sit with him. I know that because I am his father. No curriculum could ever know it. The family is the place where human beings are first loved as particular persons rather than as instances of a type, and that particular love is the very thing that makes a free response to God possible. You cannot freely choose to love someone you've never been shown. The family is where the showing happens first.
So what am I actually trying to do? What is the goal behind every hard conversation, every consequence, every moment of pushing my kids toward something they'd rather avoid?
I want to raise my children to have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Everything else, the discipline, the character formation, the habits and routines, is in service of that one aim. I'm not trying to produce well-behaved kids. I'm not trying to raise children who can assert themselves in the world. Not that those aren’t good outcomes, but they are only a means to the true end. I'm trying to introduce my children to a Person, and to form them in his image so that when they encounter him fully, they recognize him, because they've been learning to love what he loves their whole lives.
The Gospel gives us a portrait of that Person, and it is worth sitting with.
Jesus healed the sick. He didn't manage illness from a distance or treat the suffering as a problem to be solved. He stopped, he touched, he restored. He leaned toward the people everyone else was trying to avoid.
He obeyed his Father even when it cost him everything. Not reluctantly, not as a last resort, but as the deepest expression of who he was. His whole life was a gift freely given back to the One who gave it.
He loved not as a legal obligation but as an outpouring of his whole self, transfiguring every duty with grace. He told the truth even when it was unwelcome, and told it with a tenderness that never shamed the person he was speaking to. And he treated every human being he encountered, the leper, the tax collector, the woman at the well, as someone worth stopping for, worth seeing, worth loving without reserve.
That is who I want my children to become. People who move toward suffering rather than away from it. People who obey God freely, joyfully, even when it costs them. People who love with their whole selves, tell the truth with gentleness, and see in every person they meet someone God already loves.
Dubois's conditioning can make a child compliant, and even highly disciplined. But it cannot make them capable of that kind of love, because it starts from the premise that there is nothing in them to draw out, only behaviors to install. The Church begins from exactly the opposite premise. My children were made for this. The longing for God, for goodness and justice, for beauty, for love that truly satisfies, it is already in them. My job is not to put it there but to tend it, to protect it from being crowded out, and to keep pointing them toward the One who planted it and who alone can bring it to flower.
Which brings me back to Matthew 19. The disciples thought they were being responsible, keeping the crowd manageable, protecting Jesus's time. But Jesus saw something they didn't. "Let the children come to me." He takes them in his arms and blesses them. Not because they've earned it. Not because they've been sufficiently conditioned. Because they belong to him, and he knows it, and he wants them to know it too.
That's the posture I'm reaching for as a father. Someone who sees in each of his children a person God already loves unreservedly, and whose whole job is to help them believe it.
I don't always manage it. There are moments when I forget who they are, when I'm tired and impatient and I correct them toward my own convenience rather than their holiness. I regret those moments. But I've come to understand that even my repentance is part of their formation. When they see me fail and return, fail and return, they're learning something that the Heinlein’s Federation could never teach: that the goal is not flawless performance but faithful return, and that grace is always available to reorient us toward it. I am the first disciple in this house, and they are watching.
A child who knows that, who is firmly rooted in who they are and whose they are, doesn't need to elbow their way through the world. They already have everything. That's not weakness. That's the deepest kind of strength there is.
The Federation conditions citizens. Only God makes saints. And I'm finding, slowly and imperfectly, that sainthood is the only thing worth aiming for.
Some days I get close. Most days I fall short. But Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and as long as I'm aiming at him, I can trust the rest to work out.
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