Have you ever heard your mom say that
she has eyes in the back of her head? On
one fateful day when I was little I found that to be painfully true. I was sitting in the living room when I fully
understood that I should be upstairs getting ready to go somewhere. Mom had already told me once that I needed to
be getting dressed and this was now her second trip into the living room
because of my stubbornness. I didn’t
want to go wherever we happened to be heading and after she turned and headed
off across the house the idea popped into my head that I should do something I
had recently learned. I still don’t know
who designated the middle finger as an inappropriate appendage to stand alone
but I let it fly. As I defiantly held my
finger up in opposition to the parental regime requiring my compliance my mother
did an immediate about face. As she
started her turn I immediately put my hand down but I’m pretty sure that I had
a horrified look on my face at the likelihood that she knew what I had
done. Sure enough, she did. To this day I don’t know how she knew, although
I’m betting that my reflection on a window or perhaps the glass door on the
China cabinet was the key to my undoing.
I don’t remember where we were going or why I was being so stubborn or
even how she caught me but what I do know for sure is the penalty for my crime. I don’t remember being spanked much as a kid,
much less why I got spanked, apart from this particular occasion. I don’t even remember how bad the spanking
hurt because the entire time I was being spanked I was asking myself, “How did
she know? How did she see me?” An inquiring mind wanted to know.
In light of the Adrian Peterson
situation and since I recently wrote a blogpost on obedience as followers of
Christ I feel that this parenting topic is of particular importance and worth
writing about. If you haven’t read my
post entitled “The Heart of Obedience” I’d recommend that you read it first
because what I will say here in regards to nurturing obedience in your children
flows out of what I discuss there, namely the relationship between love and
obedience. You can find my previous post
here:
http://growgraceknowledge.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-heart-of-obedience.html
Let me first state that I in no way
feel like I was traumatized as a child because I was spanked. I don’t think that spanking should automatically
be considered abusive. I do consider
what Adrian Peterson did to be more than just a spanking, or a whooping, or whatever
term you prefer using. By all accounts,
and by virtue of the graphic photos, what he did was extreme and abusive. I have plenty of scars by virtue of being a
boy doing stupid things but none of my scars come from a beating or from trying
to avoid a beating. What he did was
wrong and many times the discussion of spankings get turned into discussions
about whether or not they are right or wrong.
What I want to talk about here is not about whether spankings are right
or wrong but whether or not they are the best way to raise a child.
If you were to ask a Christian parent
if they wanted to raise their child to be like a Pharisee or a follower of
Jesus Christ they would unanimously agree that they want to raise their child
to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Here’s
the thing about Pharisees: They were extremely obedient. In regard to the law they were about as
faultless as you could get and yet they were far from the kind of people Jesus
wanted them to be. Jesus desired an
obedience from his followers that flowed out of their love for him.
Jesus replied, “Anyone
who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come
to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my
teaching.”—John 14:23-24
The path of obedience for Jesus’
followers is rooted in the love of Jesus.
The Pharisees were on a very different path of obedience. They loved the law itself, not Jesus, and
their obedience to the law resulted in a very different lifestyle than that of
Jesus and his followers. These are two
very different paths of obedience.
I think the same holds true when it
comes to raising obedient children.
There are various paths to raising obedient children but they don’t all
bear the same fruit in the same way that the Pharisees and disciples of Jesus
bore very different fruit. As a parent,
would you rather your child obey you because they love you or because they don’t
want to be punished by you? On days when
patience may be wearing thin you probably just want obedience in any way that
you can get it and that, it seems to me, speaks to the heart of the
problem. If the goal is any kind of
obedience as long as it is immediate obedience then spanking works. You get your desired results and you’ve
gotten obedience from your child. However,
the discussion here is not whether it is right or wrong but whether this is the
best way and I don’t think that it is.
The problem with rule loving, follow my laws right now, parenting is
that you end up with a bunch of Pharisees.
They learn the rules of how far they can go (or how slowly you can count
to 3) before they will get into trouble.
Doesn’t this remind you an awful lot like Pharisees arguing over how far
you can walk on the Sabbath? It does to
me! Somewhere along the line someone got
in trouble for doing something on the Sabbath and it became the new rule to
enforce on others.
Another problem with this discipline
approach is that the behaviors are maintained only as long as there is an
enforcer and punisher present. When a
child grows up and can no longer be punished by their parent for the things
they grudgingly couldn’t do when they were younger they are now free to do
those things spanking free. Far too
often we see kids leaving the homes of their parents only to break every single
‘rule’ they had lived by for years. There
are a variety of factors involved in that but I’m confident that one of them is
that kids get raised to follow rules because they have to, not because they
want to. With the possibility of
parental punishment removed we see that their obedience wasn’t anything
lasting.
Above all, parents want their kids to
have a lasting obedience to something that will bear fruit throughout their
lives. That obedience is the fruit of a
different path but what does the other path look like? There are plenty of more qualified people who
could answer that question and I would love to hear how ‘non-spanking’ parents
navigate through their particular discipline and behavioral issues. Instead of offering up specific non-spanking approaches
to behavior issues what I would like to draw your attention to are some of the
roadblocks to this better and more fruitful path.
Problem #1
Your kids don’t misbehave in
convenient places.
There are reasons that meltdowns happen with an audience and it is in
those moments that the desire for immediate obedience overrides the desire for
lasting obedience. The options in these
inconvenient places boil down to bribery or a spanking preceded by the slowest
counting to 3 ever. Neither of these
will get you the best results in the long run.
Problem #2
You don’t want a conversation. You want them to listen to you the
first time. You don’t need to give a
reason. The reason is simply that you
told them to do, or not do, what you told them to do, or not do. The problem with this approach is the fact
that conversation leads to understanding.
Want to know why college kids ditch many of the rules they followed as
young kids? They were never given
legitimate reasons for those rules in the first place. They may have followed them previously but
not because they understood or agreed with them. Understanding and agreements happen in the
adult world because of conversations. This
is something our government could learn a little bit about. In this
parenting context, however, it gets tricky.
Explaining thing to kids can be challenging. Using words that very little kids can grasp
onto can be ridiculously difficult.
Conversations also take much more time than the usual exchange of
spanking threats and immediate obedience.
However, if you’re wanting the kind of obedience bears fruit past the
age of 18 you’re going to have to invest more time in the parenting conversations
you have with your kids.
Problem #3
I don’t know any other way. I get it. I’ve already said that spanking works. I never flipped my mom off after my
spanking. I did learn something. While spanking is fast acting, it isn’t long
lasting. If you’re wanting to find something
that is longer lasting then you’re going to have to find other ways to
discipline your children. This involves
creativity, and unfortunately, also usually involves more time as you have to
spend time considering what those options are and what works best with your
kid(s). All kids are different and what
works with your older child will probably not work with your youngest. How you discipline your child should be
molded to each child if you want the best results. If you aren’t creative or struggle for time I
would suggest you seek out people who have already found helpful alternative
methods. You can probably find something
on Pinterest.
Spanking isn’t the ‘one size fits all’
as it has been described by some. For
every person saying it made them better there is another person saying it has
destroyed them. The question here is
about whether or not there are better and more lasting ways to go about disciplining
children. I think there are better ways but it’s going
to require your time and I know you are busy.
Fast acting methods are blatantly tempting but I want you to invest in
parenting patterns that are longer lasting.
You may not see the fruit until years down the road but such is life. My prayer is that the fruit produced later on
would be attributed to the time and attention paid by a parent who desired much
more than strict obedience. That happens,
I believe, when obedience is rooted in the path of love.
