“Once we have accepted the duty of administering parental discipline, we discover that discipline itself falls into two categories: corrective and formative. Corrective discipline is correction of manifested sins in the past, as well as correction with regard to the future. Formative discipline anticipates temptations that are common to man and seeks to instill certain character traits beforehand”
Imitation Where It Counts
“Ineffective discipline is a way of disowning, rejecting, or hating your children. God does not do that with us, and we must not do that with our children”
And Do You Really Want To?
“If someone loses his temper, and you clean up after him, regardless of whether he is a two-year-old, a thirty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old, you are going to have to do it again . . . You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize.”
Rasputin in Jammies
“Many time, parents are reluctant to discipline when it is needed, because they think their child is feeble-minded when it comes to godly cause and effect. A mom says, ‘I don’t think my little baa-lamb’—known to outsiders as the wailing tornado, and to his siblings as Rasputin in footie jammies—“understands the connection between the whining and the spanking. He looks so sad and bewildered.’ Doesn’t understand disciplinary cause and effect, you say? But how can this be, when he is a veritable genius when it comes to ungodly cause and effect? Tell me, does he understand the connection between whining and getting whatever it is he wants”.
God’s Word Done God’s Way . . .
“We live in a time when a number of very foolish Christian parents have attempted to discipline foolishly, found out that that does not work, and concluded that the problem must be with God’s Word, and not with their own inept applications of it”
Obedience Starts Now
“Your requirement to discipline has to be based on what God tells you to do in this moment, not based on whether you were the kind of kid you ought to have been. If you were not the kind of kid you ought to have been, then you don’t fix that by refusing to be the kind of parent you ought to be. You ought to repent and start doing it God’s way now.”
The Discipline Starts Elsewhere
“Your emotional state might feel like disciplining when you should not, or it might feel like not disciplining when you should, so you cannot base discipline on the state of your emotions. In order to teach obedience, your disciplining must be itself obedient and disciplined”
Adjust Your Batting Average
“Remember that God gave Adam and Eve a perfect garden: there was a world full of yes, and there was only one no. Minimize the number of no’s in your home. This is another way of saying that you should pick your battles carefully as parents. Suppose that over the space of a month, you have issued a hundred commands, and the kids have been constantly disobeying them. It would be far better for you to reduce those hundred commands to ten commands, and enforce every one of those ten, than to keep it at a hundred and enforce a fifth of the time”
Covering the Waterfront
“I remember when I was a child, my father delivered three rules to me. Not only that, I remember where I was standing in the front yard when he delivered them to me, and I remember the fond and affectionate demeanor with which he delivered it (he had his fist in front of my face). His three principles were 1) no disobedience, 2) no lying, and 3) no disrespecting your mother. Now, what is not covered by that?”
Different Exercises Entirely
“Spanking and disciplining your children and correcting attitudes is disciplinary, not punitive, and the whole point of it is so that you can get to a certain place.”