Discipline

Hebrews 12:6–9 “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.

Chastisement is meant for good. It’s given only to those who are under our responsibility. Just as our heavenly father disciplines and chastens up, we are to do the same to our children. That is our responsibility.

Recent story of Haleigh disobeying

When she made that face at me, I felt my flesh welling up inside me. A spark of anger that was slowly kindling. I knew what I wanted to do. The same thing when I tell Haleigh to eat her food and she shakes her head no, or when Harmony groans when it’s time to go to bed. I want to control the situation.

What I don’t want to do is the real work of parenting. I don’t want to stop what I’m doing, I don’t want to try to understand the fullness of their humanity, or try to balance out my firm authority with gentle compassion. I don’t want to put the work and time into discipling my child and lovingly bringing them back into reconciliation.

I want to try to manage the behavior with a miriad of tools - sugar bribes, empty “do you want a spanking” threats, anger, physical force, volume, and cold shoulders. But all of those are designed mainly to regain control.

What they need is loving, engaged discipline. And discipline is not a tool for controlling behavior. It is a process of discipling a child’s heart toward the right loves-to take the ordinary moments of discipline and stitch them into a life of discipleship.

Discipline as Discipleship in the story of God

Israelites - time and time again they repeat this cycle where they sin, they are judged, God delivers, and they are brought back to God.

Skim through church history and you’ll find similar threads.

If we love our children, then we will find ourselves faced over and over with the task of discipling our children through discipline, not as a means of controlling their behavior for our convenience but rather as a means of stewarding their hearts toward loving God. This is why discipline is both the highest call and the hardest thing we do as parents.

John 13:34–35 “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

Our overwhelming motivation should be love. That is the way God wants us to respond. Read through 1 Corinthians, and you’ll find that when I act selfishly to control the situation, love is absent. When I’m provoked into anger, love is absent. When I respond with unkindness, love is abesnt.

The problem with instincts

If discipline were easy, we wouldn’t need to talk about practicing habits to guide us. We would just spontaneously respond with the right reaction.

We need habits that help us practice discipline as discipleship because, frankly, we have all the wrong instincts. Discipline never happens at a moment of convenience. We are always too tired, or running late, or pulled in different directions, or something else.

Lets look at some of the instincts we have that are false

Instinct 1 - “They are doing this on purpose . . . so I direct anger toward them” | People aren’t purposefully doing wrong, they are naturally doing wrong. It’s who they are. They don’t decide to sin, they sin without thinking about it.

Instinct 2 - “There’s nothing wrong, they meant the best . . . so I dismiss and ignore” | This is an overdeveloped view of their innocence, and an underdeveloped view of their fallenness. My child intentionally does wrong and that needs to be address and discipled, not dismissed and ignored.

Instinct 3 - “they just misunderstood, they can be reasoned with, the problem is educational . . . so I use useless words.” | Espeically with young children, this is an underdeveloped view of their fallenness and a major misunderstanding of child developement. Their upstairs brain isn’t fully developed and so trying to talk to them is useless. We should be using tone and body language to communicate what we can’t communicate with words. Even with older children, connecting with them on an emotional level and then a logical level usually leads to healing and reconciliation.

Instinct 4 - “I want them to feel pain and shame for their actions, then they’ll learn . . . so resort to revenge or abuse. | God’s love starts and ends in love, not anger. Physical and emotional consequences may have a place as tools of discipline, but never as vents for our own anger.

Instinct 5 - “ I am exhausted and frustrated, I need to assert control to get the right result as fast as possible. . . so I have impatient behavior management. | Discipline is not so we can get convenient behavior and have an easier life. It is about small moments of discipleship.

Instinct 6 - “I could do this right if it weren’t for this moment . . . so I abdicate my role as a parent” | When is there ever a good time to discipline? never, Because of what it is, discipline. Our children’s discipleship is also about our discipline. When we skip out on disciplining, we skip out on our role as a parent.

Instinct 7 - “I’m embarrased and need to manage my reputation so I resort to self-conscious behavior management.” | This is a temptation especially when we are in public. We try to control the situation so we can keep our identity in tact. This is an inverted view of discipleship. It’s not about us, it’s about our children. Responding to our children’s misbehavior should never be out of a desire to control our identity.

The ways we misunderstand discipline in moments of misbehavior are as infinite as our own misbehaviors.

But note that all of the above mistaken instincts have something in common: when we see our children as problems to manage instead of image-bearers to be discipled, we end up making moments of discipline about our convenience instead of their discipleship.

Pyramid of Discipleship

Our discipline should reflect discipleship.

Habit 1 - Establish Loving Authority

Hebrews 13:17 “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.”

We have a responsibility to establish authority in our children’s life. One day we are going to stand before God and give an account to our parenting responsibility. Sometimes this looks like picking a child up or intervening with a strong presence of tone or body language. It might mean sending someone home or demanding that you and a child take a walk together alone to talk. But whatever it is, it is involved and even interruptive. Authority intervenes with loving strength.

It is the opposite of sitting on the sideline and making a request. We are not politely petitioning our children to consider our point of view, we are parenting them. This means we have a relational role to stand in, not just thoughts to offer.

Good parental authority protects them and the world from themselves. But even more, being authoritative in discipline is also about reinforcing a theological reality: a child is not autonomous.

Habit 2 - Pause for a moment

James 1:19 “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:”

We are in charge, but we are far from perfect. Making some kind of pause a habit before discipline can allow us a chance to move from our instinctual reactions of anger or frustration to love and discipleship.

By nature, discipline happens in the moments when we are not prepared for it. It happens on the move, but it does not have to be off the cuff. Habits of pause are intended to to help with that. Timeout’s are good, but they are not the end goal. Discipleship doesn’t take place during timeout’s. They allow our child and really ourselves to calm down, giving time for our higher order thinking to kick in.

Habit 3 - Pray and talk to yourself

Hebrews 4:16 “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”

Who here doesn’t need help with the way they disciple their child? None of us.

We must see that moments of discipline are about us as much as they are about our kids. Parents need parenting. In these moments, we are dealing not just with our kids’ selfishness over not sharing a video game controller but with our selfishness over not wanting to be interrupted to deal with this for the third time in five minutes. And only I can do the work to realize that my anger in that moment is not a product of their misbehavior but my impatience. I can’t blame my anger on other people’s actions. There is one person responsble for my anger. . . and that is me. So prayer and and a reminding of this truth, need to be habits that happen in that moment that we approach the situation.

For example, if a child has hit his brother, it is very helpful to remind myself that I am also an angry person who wants to control the world through force. If they have disobeyed, I use a prayer to remind myself that I am also a proud person who dislikes authority. If they are scared, I use a prayer to remind myself that I am an anxious and panicky person too.

With time and practice, habits of prayer really can be developed, even in the most stressful of situations.

Habit 4 - Use Body Language and Space More Than Words and Threats

What your eyes and shoulders and hands are doing during these moments is communicating the love of the gospel—or something else—at least as much as your words are. When you can set a child in your lap to talk, or sit down on a bed beside a teenager, or kneel down to the eye level of a six-year-old, you should. When we can put a hand on their shoulder or look at them with love and not a scowl, we should. Remember, in the end, love is far more powerful than anger.

Matthew 18:15 “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”

Notice Jesus tells us to go to our brother ALONE. This kind of intimate and private space changes the way we talk and react to each other. There is a gracious wisdom in not embarrassing yourself or your child in front of everyone. It’s almost common sense. When we pull aside, we get away from the pressure of other people watching. The reason disciplining your kids in front of your friends, your in-laws, or strangers at the grocery store is so hard is because you are watching them watch you and you have all the ghosts of their expectations hanging there. Your child is aware of this too.

When a child does something at home verses when they do it in public, inconsistency.

Habit 5 - Be relentless in seeking understanding

Proverbs 4:23 “Keep thy heart with all diligence; For out of it are the issues of life.”

The best and worst of us come from our heart. As a parent, I’m trying to help my child understand their heart so they can experience heart repentance and change. Discipline without love is punishment for an act, but discipline as discipleship is training a child to become self-reflective.

Three questions to ask - “whats”: (1) What did you do? (2) What did you think was going to happen when you did that? (3) What did you want the other person to feel when you did that?

There are no good answers for these questions. I’m not looking for a good answer, I’m looking for my child to self-reflect on their own sin. Usually the right answer is I wanted to make him hurt or I wanted to make her cry. That is a heart answer.

It’s hard to move them close to God and others when you don’t know who they really are. Our efforts to understand them through questions or conversation show that we are not just out to control their behavior but out to find them, just as our heavenly father came to find us.

I get better at this habit as I practice it in myself. When I ask myself why did I say that unkind thing to my spouse, the answer - because I wanted them to hurt the way they’ve hurt me. I took revenge into my own hands, rather than letting God handle it. I’m in need of repentance and grace. A parent who know that about themselves, parents better in the moment.

Habit 6 - Think Carefully about consequences

Sin has negative effects, and sometimes permanent effects. That is why consequences are important.

James 1:15 “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”

Consequences are designed to bring us to reconciliation, i.e the Israelites straying from God, God sends consequences, usually in the form of other nations conquering them, and then they come back to God.

Putting a toddler in timeout, doesn’t reconcile, grounding a teenager, doesn’t bring about reconciliation. We should see the consequence we provide, not as an end, but as a means to an end - reconciliation.

Often, consequences don’t need to come after reconciliation, it is done before and as a means to reconcilation. It is a consequence that the playing had to stop. It is a consequence that we all had to repent. It is a consequence that we had to take the time and be vulnerable and discuss the sin. We are all raw and forgiven and reinstated—those are the most important consequences.

Is taking away a child’s dessert tomorrow because they whined today a good consequence? No, it doesn’t lead to reconciliation, and often times, we completely forget. Now we leave the child confused by our inconsistency.

A good consequence may give us the time and the space to be reconciled. For example, if a child is disobedient or disrespectful they work a chore alongside me. Instead of forcing them away where we both stew in our anger, we are forced into the same space, into cooperation, and into words that start to soften us.

Habit 7 - Confession

If repentance is the actual turning of our hearts from sin, think of confession as the step where we have to say our sin out loud so we realize how nasty it is, which helps make us want to turn from it. We help our children learn to repent when we make a habit of helping to lead them to confession.

Psalm 51:3 “For I acknowledge my transgressions: And my sin is ever before me.” Before there was repentance, there was confession.

Confession is when we come into agreement with God. So when I confess my anger, I’m agreeing with God that my anger does not please Him and that I was wrong. I’m agreeing that my sin hurts others. It doesn’t mean that I want to turn from it, that’s the next step. But I’m at minimum agreeing that in my heart I’ve done wrong.

When our kids confess, they must look the person they have wronged and say what they are guilty of out loud. Mumbling is not enough. “Okay, fine! Sorry!” is not enough. Looking at the ground and saying something is not enough, either.

We ourselves, must remember that sometimes, we are the ones that need to confess our sins to our kids. You know why we can see our spouses sin so clearly? Because we are around them so much. We know their short comings. We know what they struggle with. But do we ever stop to think that there are other people who see our sins just as clearly? Yes, our kids. They live in the same home with us, and see our sins and shortcomings. What message am I portraying to them when I don’t want to confess the sins that they so clearly see?

Our flesh tells us that people will think less of us when we confess our sins against them, but in reality, people think more of us when we do that. Confession is an act of humility, and you know what doesn’t like to be humble? Pride. If I have trouble confessing my sin and my faults, there’s a good chance that I am being blinded by pride.

Habit 8 - End in Reconciliation

No matter where we might begin, we are always building to reconciliation or repentance. There are all kinds of ways to do this, but we must insist on doing something.

Ultimately, our kids sin against us, just as we ultimately sin against God. When David sinned with Bathsheba, He said in Psalm 51:4 “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, And done this evil in thy sight. . .” The sin was against Uriah, Bathsheba’s wife. It was against Israel since David wasn’t where he was supposed to be. And it against his wife or wives who he was supposed to be faithful to (that’s a whole other sin, btw). But ultimately, it was against God. Because God was the one who had given all those interpersonal commands.

Reconciliation must be made between parent and child. That is what God intends. That is discipleship.

Psalm 51:8 “Make me to hear joy and gladness; That the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.”

After David had sinned, you see God making the first move in reconciliation. He sent Nathan the prophet. We must be the ones who move first in reconciliation. The NT tells us if a brother offends thee, we are to go to that person. We are responsible for initiating reconciliation.

The author says In our house, we have a small practice of reconciliation called the “Brothers’ Hug.” For example, when two of them break out into one of their hourly fights, we separate them (habit of pause), talk to them (habit of understanding), and have them apologize (habits of confession), and maybe there is a consequence too. This is all very important, but this process is not over until they do a Brothers’ Hug. This means a hug that lasts until both (not just one of them) cracks a smile or laughs. For the littles, this is usually a giggle, because a Brothers’ Hug usually turns into a new wrestling match. For the older ones it might take tickling or a joke or some tears, but until they can look at each other and smile, we are not there yet.

Reconciliation means the sin is behind us, and we move forward in joy. Sometimes I hold my kids after they get a spanking, or i tickle them a little bit so they know we are all good and reconciliation has been made. If I get to the end of a discipline moment and I am still so mad that I cannot hug or tickle or joke with them, then I probably have not done it right. If I can’t make a joke or get my kid to laugh at the end of a cycle of discipline, then I know I’ve probably been too harsh. If I don’t even want to, I know I’ve probably disciplined out of anger and not love.

One Thursday night, a couple of minutes after putting the boys to bed, I heard shuffling. When I went back in, I found that Coulter and Ash had been busy ferrying all of Coulter’s bedding across the room to Ash’s bottom bunk. This consisted of a remarkable nest of cozy things, including your standard sheet and blanket, an enormous teddy bear twice Coulter’s size, seven smaller stuffed creatures, five or six little muslin blankies he likes to roll into a ball and hug, two pacifiers (both of which he was too old for), and a water bottle and pillow.

Needless to say it was a significant haul. And honestly, when I opened the door, I was kind of proud. They had done it all in the dark and the whole point was so that they could have a slumber party in Ash’s bed. So I tipped my hat and said, “Well done. Have fun.” I told them as long as they were quiet that was fine and went back downstairs.

The problem was, an hour later, they were still kicking each other and cracking jokes, so I moodily moved everything back to Coulter’s bed and told them no more noise. They finally went to bed.

However, the next night they asked if they could do it again. I said no. I made it really clear. “You all could not be quiet trying to sleep in the same bed last night, so no getting out of your beds tonight, okay? I want everyone to stay in their beds.” Everyone gave their assent. There was a meeting of the minds. There was no ambiguity. A verbal contract was made.

So when I heard the footsteps a couple of minutes later, I tiptoed to the door, whipped it open, and flipped on the lights in the all-at-once approach. It worked.

I caught Ash midstride across the room, carrying a load of stuffed animals to Coulter’s bed. He looked as guilty as I thought he would. And as scared too.

One of the things I love about brothers close in age is that they kind of root for each other when one is in trouble. I will often get a plea for mercy from the sidelines: “He didn’t actually hit him that hard. I saw him, it was just kinda hard.” As I sat down in the rocking chair in their room and asked Ash to stand in front of me, I noticed Coulter watching from his bed nervously.

“Ash, what were you doing?” I asked.

“Moving Coulter’s stuff,” he answered.

“And what did I say about that?” I asked.

“Not to do it,” he answered.

“So were you disobeying on purpose?” He winced. I could tell from his pursed lips that he felt bad and was struggling to keep his composure.

“Yes.” He looked down.

There are reasons we do slow, precise confessions, because voicing reality reminds us of the weight of reality, and in this case as Ash admitted that he disobeyed on purpose, I could see the remorse and guilt fill his eyes. He knew he had messed up; he looked embarrassed and scared. Here was the consequence—he didn’t need anything else. And here was the understanding—I didn’t need anything else. In his trembling face I saw a picture of my own heart—that trembling thing, half embarrassed and half scared, full of the knowledge that I am not quite right and I always mess stuff up.

He wanted to cry right then and there because he felt broken, he definitely felt caught, he probably felt stupid, and he seemed to feel scared. So we talked for a minute. “Is that a bad thing to disobey?” I asked.

“Yes,” he admitted. As he did, he began to cry.

“And what do you need to say to me if you disobey me?”

“Sorry.” He sniffled.

“So can you look in my eyes and say sorry?” He blinked his tears away and did it, but he still looked more scared than sorry.

“And then what am I going to say to you?” I asked him.

He stopped crying. “That you forgive me?” That was the right answer, he knew it, but he looked almost surprised—like it couldn’t be true again this time.

“That’s right. Ash.” I looked into his eyes, “I forgive you. And what do I say about how I feel about you when you do a bad thing?”

“That you love me anyway?”

“That’s right. And what do we need to do now?”

“A hug until we smile,” he said.

So we did. I squeezed him until he smiled, even though he still had tears in his eyes.

That is when I noticed little Coulter. Far off to the side in his little bed, he had started bouncing with an uncontrollable smile. When we hugged, he started cheering and pumping his fist in the air.

And why shouldn’t he? Aren’t we identifying with Christ in our own small way? Aren’t we rehearsing and practicing the narrative of forgiveness and reconciliation? We’re not just telling it to each other, we’re participating in it. Trying it out from all angles. Testing the story and seeing that it fits. Indeed, what we seem to want and need over and over is to remember and relive forgiveness. After all, reconciliation is the story of the world. If it’s not the story of our families, then bitterness will be.

Discipline, when it becomes discipleship, is something worth practicing and crying over, laughing and hugging over, and something worth cheering for too.