Parent Extremis

When I read To Train Up a Child, published by
No Greater Joy, I was struck by the claim that the child training methods taught by the Pearls could result in less anger, less yelling, and fewer spankings. That’s not the reputation the Pearls have in the media. When someone tells you they use a switch on their children, you assume they do not live in a gentle home.

I contend, for several reasons, that corporal punishment is not necessarily violent. For one thing, the Amish practice it - a people whose ancestors died because they refused to practice violence. For another, dealing with your child before you become angry can prevent you from losing your head and becoming abusive. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. I told a story last month about a non-spanking mother who caused more damage with her words than if she had been willing to spank her daughter. And, dealing with your child before your child becomes angry also makes for a less violent home.

The Pearls condemn child abuse, they oppose disciplining in anger, and they positively affirm that when children are well-trained, they are happier and more peaceful.

One message I got from To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debi Pearl, and probably one of the main messages I was supposed to get, was that there is a difference between training and punishment.

I confess I don’t really resonate with the idea of punishment. I don’t want to say to anybody, “I don’t care if this helps you, but you deserve to suffer.” But the Pearls deal with this issue too, in a very interesting manner, by arguing that punishment takes away guilt, that children actually feel better knowing that justice is done. I know that young children - probably most of us adults too, aren’t very good at repenting and receiving forgiveness. So punishment deals with guilt feelings when there is no other way of dealing with them.

But tiny children don’t need to be punished. They don’t know what they are doing. They aren’t disobeying you; they aren’t even listening to you. The Pearls explain how to train a child to listen, to understand what the word “No” means, to learn to stop what they’re doing when they hear that word. That’s training. The Pearls are controversial for suggesting that a small switch can be used to assist in that training.

But what is more merciful: to teach a child to avoid trouble and danger by applying mild physical pain, or not to teach them at all? Childish disobedience is cute until it leads them into a busy street. Which consequence for disobedience do you want your child to face : a small switch or a large truck?

The headmistress at The Common Room writes about this about discipline, “Reproof and correction are withdrawals from the bank.”

That makes me think.

1. Discipline is not an absolute, as if it had to be applied in every situation, for every offense, in the same way, or else our children will lose track of what’s right and wrong.
2. Discipline is an aspect of love, or it’s worth nothing. There is no dichotomy between love and discipline, as I’ve said before, as if you had to choose to stop loving your children in order to discipline them.
3. Discipline is an expression of love, but your children have to be taught that. Yes, their first reaction to unpleasant consequences may not be pleasant. They have to know that you love them before you discipline them.
4. The righteous life is a joyful life. You’re not teaching your children how to play a shell game, where they can never find the prize until some unknown future date in a future place. Joy happens right now. Show them what real joy means, both by your example and through their experience.

Kelly Mills, the SF Chronicle’s baby blogger, is now dealing with a six-year-old who appeals to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to protest parental privileges being withheld from children, specifically six-year-olds. She points out her mother’s hypocrisy and responds to her mother’s commands with, “Or you’ll do what?”

Most significantly, this six-year-old girl asks her mother, “Why?” Her mother admits, “The problem with this question is that often the truthful answer would have been, ‘because that sounds really, really inconvenient for me’”

Here are some answers I wish I could give to the question of why my child should obey me:

1. Because I follow that rule too. I’m not a hypocrite. It’s a good thing to do, and I do it. Or, it’s a good thing for six-year-olds to do. I did it when I was six. Or, I should have done it when I was six. I would have been better off.

2. Because it’s right. It’s not merely convenient for me. It’s honorable and noble and someday you will learn to do what’s honorable and noble even when it’s not pleasant or convenient. If I wanted convenience, I would give in to your whims and save my breath.

3. Because there will be consequences if you don’t. And if you don’t see the natural consequences to putting yourself higher than the authorities over you, you will later. If you don’t see the consequences now, I’ll come up with some consequences real quick. I’m creative.

4. Because in the real world, you can’t get everything you want. If you don’t learn delayed gratification, you won’t know true gratification. Sometimes I tell you No simply to give you practice in hearing it. Because I love you more than almost anyone else in the world.

The Common Room quotes an 1891 parenting magazine:

But about family bickerings. The two chief causes of these are selfishness and harsh judgment of others. No punishment is of the smallest use to combat these; punishment may awake resentment and arouse greater spite against the person on whose account it is incurred, but it will never lessen the selfishness by a jot.

The blogger wisely notes that punishment can at least promote self-control. In my own experience, I’ve noticed it can promote repentance, or at least the seeking after it. “Why am I always being punished? Can I change so that I’m not?”

But the point is well-taken that the heart needs to change. I don’t know of any fulcrum that puts pressure on the heart other than God himself. I don’t think you can teach life principles or ethical values that will make a child stop being selfish. You can model the joys of forgiveness and generosity. But I don’t think you can say, “In our family, we are always nice to our siblings.” And make it stick without help.

Story 2:

My car broke down in front of a house, so I knocked on the door to ask to use their phone. The woman showed me where the phone was, then proceeded to continue putting her six-year-old daughter to bed.

Of course, as a visitor, I was a distraction, and the little girl began showing off for me. Specifically, she began showing off how she could keep getting out of bed and her mother couldn’t stop her.

Instead, her mother yelled at her, calling her stupid and I don’t remember what else. The girl just smiled. I think I left before she finally went to bed.

Oh, but her mother didn’t spank her. That would have taught the girl hatred and violence. The mother would have seemed non-modern. So yelling and insulting was preferable.

But I would prefer my mother not call me stupid, quite desperately. I would have been willing to endure lots of things before I would want to endure that.

Let me tell you two stories about mothers disciplining their children. You tell me which mother you would have rather had:

Story 1:

This isn’t a first-hand story, but it was told to me by my roommate, who used to live with one of the our pastors. So I knew him a long time, he knew their family a long time.

The pastor’s son was four at the time. Active, intelligent, with his own agenda. You know four year olds like that, don’t you?

He crossed lines fairly often, which must have been frustrated. But his parents didn’t punish him for frustrating them. They only punished him for crossing the line.

His mother was a short, thin woman with a soft voice. My roommate would often hear her speak her son’s name quietly, yet with finality. Then he would hear her in the kitchen preparing to wreak judgment on her son. Her son could hear her too.

She caused her son physical pain. But did she cause emotional pain? Did she violate his dignity? Did she humiliate him or did she appropriately humble him?

What do you think?

When I was a child, I read child psychology books. Just to make sure my parents were raising me correctly.

One of them said you should never discipline children in anger. You might hurt them.

Another said that you must always discipline your child in anger. How can they possibly understand why you’re bringing suffering into their life, unless they can see that you’re angry with them? Cold, calm discipline would warp their tiny psyches.

How about another alternative? How about disciplining your children in righteousness and justice? Parents should be able to say, “You’re not getting my goat. You’re not getting control of my emotions. And my emotions aren’t controlling me. But I need to correct what you did. Because it was wrong.”

Tomorrow I’ll tell the first of two stories to illustrate what I mean.

A while ago, we had a good discussion about how to teach children there are consequences for their behavior. If you’re politically correct, you must somehow do that without causing your child any physical or emotional suffering. Otherwise, people won’t think you’re a nice parent, which is of course the reason why you had children. You want other people to think you’re a nice person. If they do, you might qualify for a job in a 50s sitcom.

Still, there’s a difference between discouraging behavior and discouraging children. In my wife’s family, yelling was always used as a means of belittling children: control by dismemberment. For PlainJaneMom, yelling can be used as a consequence for bad behavior, without intending to hurt the child. We stirred up some sparks because she and I didn’t seem to understand where the other was coming from.

Still, now that the sparks have died down, I want to go on record as opposing the use of yelling as a form of discipline. No, I’m not trying to be politically correct, but I think most parents can’t do it without hurting their child. It can lead to forms of abuse. Of course, that’s what they say about spanking too.

One problem with distraction can be that it chooses peace over truth. It’s a technique to trick the child into doing what you want, or not doing what you want, but it has no permanent teaching value.

What is the place of peace in our homes? Is it an absolute; that is, more important than truth or righteousness or growth or development? Or is it part of all those other things? Jesus said, “I came not to bring peace but a sword.” But they called him the Prince of Peace, who didn’t fight back even when he was arrested. He apparently thought that peace would result from all his controversial trouble-making.

If all you want is peace, forget distraction. Try laudanum.

Laudanum was a tincture of opium that was sometimes used to quiet babies. In the 1880’s, it was advertised for that purpose in Harper’s Weekly. A nifty invention of the Industrial Revolution: peace through science. Any other means to quiet a baby might kill him. But this was a scientific method that did just what it was supposed to do, when used as directed. In larger doses, of course, it was fatal. The long-term effect were not apparent, but in the short term, it really kept those kids quiet.

How do you keep your kids quiet? What are the long term effects of your techniques?

Eventually distraction stops working, or it becomes bribery. An older child can figure it out. Eventually they will discover that their defiance is a bargaining tool. They are bound to get something out of the deal. The problem is that you can’t continue this forever. And your child’s future boss or spouse won’t be willing to.

Distraction uses cleverness and mental force instead of physical force or moral force. What is the difference, really, between exercising force by physical means or by mental means? Is either one more respectful of the child than the other? Is either one less forceful?

My wife asked me at breakfast about distraction. She brought it up, she didn’t know I was writing about it. She asked, isn’t everything distraction? Choosing to do something good instead of something bad?

What do you think?

When a small child wants to hold a harmful object or do something dangerous, many people recommend distraction. They says that when a child wants to do something forbidden, all the parent needs to do is to give them something else to do, or give them something else to play with.

We do use distraction with our infant son. He drops objects frequently enough that he hardly notices when we hand him a toy instead of the electric cord he wanted to chew on. He doesn’t care what he plays with.

Like some medications, distraction provides fast, temporary relief, but doesn’t cure the problem. The argument for distraction says that spanking is works only because the parent is bigger. But distraction works only because the parent is smarter.

How long can the parent keep it up? I’m not talking about how long the parent can be smarter than the child, though it hear it’s much shorter than we wish. I mean how long and how far are parents willing to distract not only the child from the behavior, but also how long are they willing to distract the child from the main issue.

When do parents plan to stop distracting and start to teach delayed gratification, or self- denial? One blogger says he wants to get away from teaching self-denial. Unfortunately this would require moving to a different planet.

Is present peace more important than future contentment? When is a child ready to learn that they’re not always the same thing?

I once read a Gestalt Institute book on raising 1-2 year olds, saying that, though they don’t recommend it, some parents may choose to use corporal punishment to “quickly extinguish dangerous behavior.”

That cracked me up. So what do other forms of discipline accomplish? Slowly extinguish dangerous behavior? Are they trying to say that if you really want your toddler to stop doing something, you should spank him, but if it doesn’t matter if he ever stops, any form of discipline would work?

The Gestalt Institute has a point. Many parents have told me that they only spank when their child’s life was jeopardized by bad habits. Is there an alternative that works?

Once I learned how to talk, I developed a habit of talking back to my mother. It wasn’t that I simply disagreed with her sometimes, even as a small child. No, even when she might have been right, I wanted to defend myself from criticism and suffering and correction by getting back at her with words.

The problem was that she wouldn’t discipline me until I made her mad. I could continue talking back to her without any consequences until I reached that point. Even then, the consequences were only serious enough to convince me to stop doing it temporarily. They didn’t convince me to stop doing it in the future.

Yet I knew it was wrong. I felt terrible talking to my mother like that. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. If I did, I would have to admit that I was wrong and she was right. Too high a price to pay. I couldn’t stop myself. I was only six years old

But still, I remember wishing, somehow, that she would stop me.

I’ve seen an illustration that shows a pair of scales with the words LOVE and DISCIPLINE. Parents are supposed to keep the two in balance.

But why does love need to be kept in balance?Real love should infinite, powerful, unbounded. The Bible never says “God is discipline.” Even Shakespeare wrote that “the quality of mercy is not strained.” What is the value of discipline if it has to temper love, if it isn’t itself a part of love?

Maybe the scales should have said something like AFFECTION and DISCIPLINE. Or positive love and negative love. Or pleasant love and unpleasant love. But if it’s not love, I don’t want to give it to my child.