The leaders of our ward are struggling with what must seem to them a huge problem.  It is a family of four children ages 11 to 4, their unemployed father, and their cancer-stricken mother.  The mother has just been sent off to Utah to be cared for by her sisters-in-law.  Her leg broke because of the cancer, and her outlook is bleak.  The father quit his job to take care of the children.

The children are difficult, to say the least.  They have never had any discipline.  They smell.  Food is being taken to the family, but it must be either pizza or pasta because the children will eat nothing else.  A pot of soup was disdained and poured out.

Two years ago the woman was the breadwinner of the family.  She is college-educated and worked as a family counselor.  Her husband spent his days trying to make a go of his video game business.  He finally gave it up, and got a job at a bakery when his wife had to quit her employment because of the cancer.

Watching this college-trained counselor deal with her impossible children has been interesting.  The number two child was impossible for her and the Primary organization, too.  She never, ever let herself become perturbed.  She never, ever disciplined her children.  She was always calm and unruffled.  She was the expert who had been trained and educated in proper child-rearing techniques.

I watched as she squatted in front of her misbehaving 5-year-old.  She was getting down on his level and gently explaining why he couldn't act like he was acting.  He lunged forward, and gave her a hard shove.  She went spralling.  He took off like a shot, and began doing laps around the center pews of the meetinghouse with his mother in pursuit.  She worked at trying to continue to look unruffled and in control of her emotions as they completed the second lap.  I was prepared to grab the boy for her the next time he came by, but someone behind me caught him first.

The bishopric assigned Steve Moultrie the calling of dealing with and teaching this child.  Steve was the perfect choice.  He placed limits on the child's behavior.  Whenever the boy stepped over those limits, he was put in a vise.

"Is it time for a vise?" he'd warn the boy.  The vise was a tight, unrelenting hug while sitting on Steve's lap.  The grip would ease as behavior improved and the struggling ceased.

The boy came to love Steve.  When the family entered sacrament meeting, he'd look for Steve and run to him.  The family began sitting behind Steve so that the boy could sit with his teacher who loved him.  The boy appreciated having limits put on his behavior.  He loved being held, appreciated, and cuddled.  He is now nearly normal.

But his younger brother isn't.  He's a carbon copy.

The parents never learned.  They never noticed.  They never do anything.  They have created a nest of impossible-to-deal-with problems.  The mother is the lucky one.  She has found a way out, but I fear for the father and for the future of these children.  This expert on family relationships and child-rearing is escaping a mess of her own making, and no one else is going to be able to clean it up.