Parent Extremis

Should you only spank your child when his life is in danger?

I’ve talked to some authoritarian parents about this. The question is, what kinds of things can put your child’s life in danger? We all agree that cars and trucks in the street can do it, so we all keep our children out of the busy street. In high-crime neighborhoods, some parents keep their children off the street even when there are no cars, if you see what I mean.

Some conservative Christian parents insist, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that they would never spank their child except when the child’s life is at stake. They quote verses such as Ezekiel 18:4, which says, “The person that sins will die.”

Does disobedience itself put your child’s life in danger? Is disobedience itself a “dangerous behavior”? In a dangerous world, it becomes more obvious. In a world of flash floods and wild predators, disobedience can be deadly.

Is it as obvious in our world?

Parenting styles really do come from different worldviews. Some parents seems to believe that children are basically good. In fact, one parenting blogger says that it’s possible to make your child love you so much that they will never disobey you.

Other parents say that children are not basically good, the world is not basically good, nobody is basically good. There is hope for everybody, and God’s image is stamped on everyone, but left alone, people will gravitate toward the easiest path. So will children. They may love their parents to pieces, but if they know they can get away with something, they will try it.

Maybe I tend toward the second style of parenting because I was the second type of child.

It’s different when a college coach waves his finger at you and says “Son, you need to be disciplined,” and when your grandmother waves a switch at you and says, “Son, you need to be disciplined.”

Or is it?

When I was in high school, joining the military seemed a safe option. We had left Vietnam and we certainly weren’t going to Russia or anywhere else that we could imagine. In a peacetime like that, a drill instructor may seem cruel or harsh, because he’s forcing his troops to do things they won’t have to do later. If America never enters another ground war, American soldiers aren’t really going to need to know how to run across a field without getting shot.

But in wartime, a drill instructor doesn’t seem so harsh. If he doesn’t teach his troops to how to run fast, when they will soon need to know how to do that, that isn’t compassion. It’s not compassion, knowing that our children’s character faults could kill them, not to take radical measures to repair them.

What do you think?

Something I learned during my two years running the church nursery:

Taking care of a group of two-year-olds on a walk is very much like tending a flock of sheep. In fact, daycare centers should use small, gentle sheepdogs as adjunct caregivers. The children would love them.

“Work with the wiggle,” said Miss Henrietta Mears, a hero of Christian education. But our educational institutions can’t do that. They have to work the wiggle out. If not, they wouldn’t be able to maintain control. At least, not of the two-year-olds.

Both ends of the parenting styles debate can get this one wrong: disciplining for the convenience or preferences of the parent, rather than the good of the child.

Strict, authoritarian parents are accused of regimenting their children to make their own lives easier. By carefully controlling their children, they claim to bring joy to their home, instead of discord. But are they bringing joy to their children? What is their main goal?

On the other hand, gentle, attached parents can fall in love with their parenting style. They want a home where the parents always have calm, modulated voices, even when the children don’t. They can refuse to stop their children even when their children want and need stopping. Are they bringing joy to their children? What is their main goal?

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that a worldview without suffering is not a view of the world we live in. Raising them to live in a different world might make parents feel good, but I don’t think it’s not responsible. People can go on and on, asking why God doesn’t prevent earthquakes (though can you prevent them?), but the fact is that there are earthquakes. People suffer cold in the winter, and they suffer from heat in the summer. That’s the world your children live in.

Those who think that raising peaceful children means never spanking them should consider how the Amish raise their children. They raise them not only to be peaceful, but to be forgiving, even when a gunman seizes their classroom. But they don’t raise them without spanking them.

I confess that too often I look at other children and other parents, and assume that if I’m doing something similar to the other parents, and that if my child is doing something similar to other children, I’m not doing a bad job as a parent.

The only problem is, character isn’t graded on a curve. Just because everybody is doing it doesn’t make it right. My slave-owning ancestors probably were men of character in many ways. Just not in the area of slave-owning. Some of them were against secession, against the Civil War. But they weren’t willing to leave their plantations to do something about it. They were only willing to leave their plantations to do what everybody else was doing, which was to die in battle. Character has consequences.

In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, a pious villager returns to his former home with stories of the Holocaust that is beginning. He has seen it with his own eyes, but his former neighbors don’t believe him. They don’t flee. They had been taught religion and character, but not the character that gives you the courage to believe the truth even when it means you have to leave everything that’s familiar to you. Most of these villagers died in the Holocaust.

Plain Jane Mom writes about Elizabeth Pantley’s No-Cry Discipline book, which she describes as saying that “making a positive emotional connection with your kids is the way to bring order to chaos and leave the screaming behind.”

I agree that screaming is not an effective method of discipline, but ironically, it seems to be more common among parents who don’t believe in (formally) punishing their children, who don’t want their children to experience unpleasant consequences because they don’t want to see them cry.

Consequences teach children. The goal of the parent should be to allow their children to be taught by natural consequences if possible.

But some natural consequences of the actions of children include death. Sometimes children are killed or crippled because of things they do. So maybe the goal of the parent should be to teach the child by providing consequences that are less permanent than natural consequences. The consequences of not disciplining children can be severe.

What do you think about that?