Biblical Wisdom

The disciplining of a child is a two step process. It requires training first, and correction afterwards. A child must be taught the way he should behave before any deviant behavior can be corrected. There is no justification for using corrective measures on a child who has never been taught the expected behavior in the first place. This does not mean that every possible nit-picky application of a teaching must be covered in exhaustive detail. If you have taught your child to play nicely with his or her siblings, and the child begins grabbing toys, then a part of the correction process will involve helping him to see the meaning of "play nicely" on his own.

Obedience Lessons. One way to train a child in the way he should go is to use "obedience lessons". These are instructions you give your small children for the primary purpose of teaching them to become accustomed to obeying your voice. You can give them simple chores like wiping the dining room chairs with a cloth, or throwing away bits of litter collected from the yard. If you run low on chores, give them some arbitrary assignment. For instance, you might send them to the bathroom sink to brush their teeth, and then send them back ten minutes later to do it again.

Extend "obedience lessons" to the church. Teach your child that if the man in the pulpit says to open to a certain song in the hymnal, you obey his voice regardless of whether you already know the song or not. If the man in the pulpit says to open to such and such a verse, you open to it, even if you have already memorized it.

Begin teaching children to obey your will at the earliest possible age. The first time that little tyke clamps his mouth shut and turns his face from the spoon, you gently but firmly press his cheeks until his lips open back up, draw his face back to the spoon and insert it. Sure, he s signaling that he s full, and after another bite or two, you re going to stop feeding him, but not until he has learned who is in control and who is under submission first.

If you tell the little toddler to pick up his blocks and he ignores you, do not start picking them up for him. You gently but firmly pull him to his feet, walk him over to his blocks and guide his hand down if you have to, and place his fingers over the block if you must, and hold them there as you walk him to the toy box to deposit it. If he resists, you lean more on "firmly" and less on "gently". If he starts to refuse, to squirm and whimper, you get down low in his face to where he can hear you whisper and tell him, "You ll do what I say, or we ll take a trip to the bathroom right now!" And if he doesn t believe you, prove it to him right then and there.

Then come right back out and continue with the same toy you left off with. If he doesn t catch on after you walk him through the first block, you take him through every toy on the floor until he does catch on. If he s still refusing to pick up the toys of his own volition by then, dump the toy box out and start all over. "But why? The floor s clean now!" Did you seriously think this whole exercise was about cleaning a floor?

Practice doing right before the occasion for it is needed. We used to act out at the kitchen table how we would behave at Grandma s house. We would have our children pretend on the couch how to sit in church during choir practice when we would not be sitting with them to supervise but we would be watching from the choir loft!

Replace Bad Words with Good Words. Train your children to replace bad words with good words. Do this first by example. You as the parent should replace any bad words you might be saying with good words instead. For example, parents sometimes say bad words like, "If I have to tell you that one more time " Replace these bad words with some good words like, "What did I tell you to do? You didn t obey, did you? Go to the bathroom (or the bedroom or the woodshed or wherever you choose to do "business").

All children learn by experience at what point a spanking actually comes, and they time their obedience to occur just prior to that point. The same child who

learns to obey a single, calm command from the teacher at school also knows to wait for a vessel to pop in the screaming parent at home. The obedience of the small child is 100% controllable by the authority whom God holds responsible for that child s obedience. Why else do you suppose God made parents bigger and smarter and stronger than their children?

Some other bad words that parents say are, "Stop it! Shut up!" Is that how you want to hear your child talking to his siblings during play? If your child is becoming crabby, then replace these bad words with good words like these: "When you re acting crabby, it s because you re tired. Go to bed and take a nap." Notice that this is not a threat, it is an instruction. You are not saying that they are in danger of having to take a nap if they do not change their tone. You are saying they have already shown that they in fact need a nap now, and they are going to take one.

Not only should parents say the right words to their children, but they should also say them in the right way. The tone of the parent should be one of eternal calm. Just remember this axiom: the quality of the discipline decreases as the volume of the parent increases. Rising decibels reveal a breakdown of control. We don t want to sound like people going over a cliff when we talk to our children. We want our children to learn to obey a whisper.

Children should be taught to replace bad words with good not only by parental example, but also by parental instruction. Teach them, for instance, that it is bad to say the words, "I want " Teach them to say, "May I please have " instead. Teach them to replace words such as, "I m bored " with "What may I do to help you?" Teach them to never say, "Do I have to?", but "Sure, I ll be glad to!" Do not permit them to say, "I don t like ", but have them say, "I wouldn t care for , thank you."

As you read those phrases that were not permitted and those good words that replaced them, did you notice a difference in how the words sounded even in your own mind? Can t you just hear the whining tone and the rudeness in the very pronunciation of the bad words? Can t you hear the refreshing sweetness in the phrases that replaced them? The very words you choose carry a tone of their own and reflect the spirit of the speaker. They also have a harmonic effect upon the spirit of the speaker and hearer alike, so that if your child doesn t feel very polite as he is made to say the right words, the repetition of even a contrived politeness will tend to affect his spirit in a positive way. After all, once a person says something, he tends to feel a certain commitment to it.

Not only do we want to teach our children to replace bad words with good ones, but we also want to teach them to say the good words before they ever learn to use bad words to start with. In our home, we would use the example of naughty children to do this. We would say something like, "Do you know what I heard a naughty child say today?" This would always catch their interest, and with big eyes they would look up expectantly and breathe, "What?" I would always build up to it by saying things like, "Oh, it was one of the worst things I think a child could ever even say!" "What was it, Daddy?" "That naughty child needed a really big spanking, didn t they?" "Yes, yes, they did! What was it?" "It was so bad, I know you would never say a thing like that, would you?" "No, never! What was it? What was it?" Once they were fully prepared to abominate whatever thing the foul fiend had spoken, I would finally say something like, "They said, You can t make me! They actually said that to their own mother! Can you believe " etc.

We Never Get Anything We Ever Cry For! Another thing that we trained our children to avoid as much as bad words and bad tones was crying to get things. Our children understood from before they can even now remember that we never get anything we ever cry for! It may have been something we were going to give them, it may have been something we wanted them to have and had specifically bought just for them, we may have just been reaching for it to give to them. But the instant they cried for it, that s it! They lost it. We would mournfully say, "Oh no, I can t give you that now, because you just cried for it, and we never get anything we ever cry for. If I gave that to you now, you would begin to think that crying is a way to get things, and God would not want me to teach you that. Maybe some other time you will remember to ask for it nicely, but I cannot give it to you now. You cried to get it, so now you cannot have it."