Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. - Proverbs 13:24 (ESV)
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? - Hebrews 12:7 (ESV)
Discipline is one of the more fraught and complex issues in parenting, and for good reason. No matter how you slice it, discipline involves inflicting some sort of discomfort on your child. In this article, I am going to suggest several quick points about discipline, all of which could be expanded on much further.
Defining Discipline in Parenting
What is discipline? Discipline is teaching or training obedience to certain rules or a moral code. In the Old Testament, the word often translated discipline can be defined as chastening, instructing, disciplining, instructing, teaching, or chastising. Sometimes, it is used to describe pain that is inflicted, as in chastisement (cf. Deuteronomy 22:18; 1 Kings 12:11). Other times, it is used to describe using words to teach or instruct (cf. Psalm 16:7; Proverbs 9:7). In the New Testament, the clearest word for discipline is used six times, with four of them occurring in Hebrews 12. The word refers to child-rearing, training, instructing, and chastening. We should notice that these terms are broad rather than highly specific. For parents, discipline is another way of describing the entire process of parenting rather than one aspect of parenting. This is especially true in the case of the New Testament term. Discipline is not just about negative consequences for forbidden behavior. Discipline refers to all the ways that parents teach their child to walk in the way they should go. Discipline and parenting can be used as synonyms in that sense.
Discipline should be disciplined
This is rather obvious, but it needs to be said. Discipline of children needs to reflect discipline by parents. It means that parents must be in control of themselves when they discipline. Discipline is not an outlet for anger or an excuse for parents to vent on their children. That is a ridiculous and wicked notion. If parents are going to discipline their children well, they must be self-disciplined first. Also, they need to be disciplined in the way that they do it. Discipline is not an excuse for a parent to vent frustration. That is not the purpose at all, and, when parents are frustrated and angry, they are in no condition to discipline. They must be self-disciplined to discipline well.
Discipline is unavoidable
If discipline is so problematic, why do it? The answer is that it is unavoidable. Some parents seem to think that discipline is optional. It is not. What is optional is the specific forms that discipline takes. Even in the gentle parenting movement, discipline exists, it is just that the movement rejects certain forms of discipline, some of which Christians should also reject. However, there is no escaping the fact that children must be taught what is right and what is wrong, what is safe and what is lethal, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. There are many things that children will not learn unless they are taught.
Discipline should be done in love
This is another obvious one that needs to be said anyway. It should go without saying that discipline should be done in love. Discipline is best understood as an expression of love rather than an exception to it. In the context of Hebrews 12, a father who does not discipline his son is treating his child as though her weren’t really his. The connection between love and discipline is strong. The question in Hebrews is rhetorical, meaning that there is no father who does not discipline his son. This, of course, is not strictly true. There are fathers who do not discipline their sons for any number of reasons, but the clear implication in Hebrews is that there is no good reason for a father not to discipline his son. The only kind of reason that he would fail to discipline his son is if he treated him as though he weren’t his son at all. The point in Hebrews is that no son should wish or expect his father not to discipline him because discipline is a basic way that a father loves his children. For a son not to want discipline is the same as the son not wanting to be loved. Hebrews’ way of describing parental discipline frames for parents what discipline is about and how it is to be done. Discipline is about love, not hate. It is about freedom for the child, not control by the parent. It is about maturity, not immaturity.
Discipline needs to decrease in specificity over time
What do I mean by specificity? By specificity, I mean that parents must be very specific with their children in the early days. The younger a child is, the less a child will understand commands, ideas, or principles. That means that parents must use very specific words to draw lines in children’s minds. Children must be told not to touch electrical outlets, or climb on something dangerous, or put something toxic in their mouths. Parents can be more vague than they realize. I began to learn how vaguely I sometimes communicate a few years ago. It was almost shocking. In my mind, the ideas were so clear. However, the person I was communicating with wasn’t even close to understanding what I was thinking. When I became aware of my actual words and compared what I was thinking with what the other person understood, the person’s understanding was closer to what I said than my own thoughts. Since then, I have continued to notice at times that I am not communicating clearly or specifically, and it happens in parenting, too. The younger and less mature a child is, the more specific instructions and discipline need to be. This requires great care from parents, especially with words. Words are so common that we tend to underestimate their value, but this is a great mistake. Parents can easily get a sort of tunnel vision in which they are focused only on the present moment, and so fail to see the potential of their words to lay a further foundation for their child’s understanding in the future. Instead of giving curt and haphazard instructions to children, it is better to consolidate wisdom into choice words that a child can understand, but which have clear reasoning behind them that could be explained if the child were capable of understanding. This means that it is not sufficient for a parent to say whatever produces the appropriate behavior, treating words as throwaway tools. Parents need to be able to justify their choices to themselves, because they will have to justify them before God.
Discipline needs to decrease in rigidity over time
By rigidity, I mean that parents must draw very clear lines about what children can and cannot do when they are very young. However, as children grow older, parents must seek to fade out specific instructions while fading in principles for living. This point might be clearer to understand if we work backwards from how parents hope their children turn out to be in the future. Imagine your children in their mid-twenties. What do you hope they are like? How do you want them to live? The biblical emphases from Proverbs come into clear relief here. Parents should want their children to fear God and live for Him through Christ. Adult children should be wise, humble, prudent, self-controlled, kind, just, hard-working, honest, gracious, generous, hospitable, patient, and discerning. No parent reading the Bible should imagine their children at twenty-five years and think, “I just want them to do what I tell them,” or “I just don’t want them to inconvenience me,” or “I just want them to depend on me.” Parents should want their children to be wise. Ideally, children will become wiser than their parents. They will learn to make better choices earlier than their parents did. Shouldn’t that be the goal? Yet some parents struggle to give up control, attempting to maintain a rigid control over their children that continues well into adulthood. That is not successful parenting. That is failure. That is not faithfulness, but faithlessness. Some parents need the biblical wakeup call that children are supposed to grow up and become independent of their parents. A child’s independence as an adult in no way lowers the biblical standard that children should honor their parents. But honoring a parent at three years old should look much different in practice from honoring a parent at twenty-three years old.
Conclusion
In this article, I have sought to define discipline in parenting and to give some initial principles for how to think about it. In subsequent articles, I will share some more thoughts in an attempt to help us think biblically about discipline in parenting.