What are the causes that lead a child to disrespect and disobey their parents?
1. Thoughtlessness: At first, it is thoughtlessness, which soon develops into deliberate attempts to tell lies and escape punishment for bad conduct.
2. Bad company: Bad company tells imperceptibly on the child’s character, until he becomes decidedly averse to submit himself to home-control, unless great care and rigid means are taken at the very outset to check the evil influences.
3. False sense of superiority over others: In after years there is developed in many person a false sense of intellectual or other superiority over their elders, breeding in consequence a lack of reverence for them.
4. Selfishness: Selfishness also often asserts itself at a very early age in wicked boys, and the world weans them more and more away from their duty to their best kith and kin.
Solution
The only way to mend such tendencies is to make the hearts of young child feel early how much they owe to their parents. If one is ungrateful to one’s own father or mother, how can one be true to others or be trusted by them?
Life is a course of discipline in which we are trained to make sacrifices for those who are dear to us. And who can possibly be dearer than those who have given birth to us, tended us with unbounded affection, watched us day and night, who have prayed and wept for us, who give us everything worth having in this life, who, in short, live and are prepared to die for us?
Conclusion: Our parents are Gods on earth to us. Blessed are the children who never cause grief to the hearts of their parents.