By Becky De Oliveira
“Children are the heritage of the Lord, and unless parents give them such a training as will enable them to keep the way of the Lord, they neglect solemn duty. It is not the will or purpose of God that children shall become coarse, rough, uncourteous, disobedient, unthankful, unholy, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. The Scriptures state that this condition of society shall be a sign of the last days.” —The Signs of the Times, September 17, 1894.
The discipline of children has changed dramatically over the past few generations. My great-grandmother was a first generation American, the child of Norwegian immigrants who were, evidently, very strict. If she did anything worthy of punishment at school, she’d receive an extra beating at home that evening. When her older brothers am- bushed her with a hidden ski jump on her cross-country commute home from school and she fell, hurting herself quite badly and laughing with hysteria the way one some- times does after a scary injury, she got a good thrashing from her father. Foolish laughter was not tolerated; nor was inappropriate smiling. Even my mother, who was born in the late 1940s, attended a one-room school and her older brother— who today would have been almost certainly diagnosed with ADHD—was beaten routinely, sometimes with fire pokers and yardsticks.
By the time I started school in the late 1970s, corporal punishment was administered at school only if parents provided written permission. I remember one boy whose parents had evidently agreed that he could be spanked in school. The teacher paddled him almost every day because he couldn’t read. Sometimes she outsourced this task to another student, a young girl who was a proficient reader and who was given a paddle studded with holes and instructed to hit him if he stumbled over words or misbehaved during reading. My parents did not sign the spanking agreement, and so most of my punishments at school consisted of writing hundreds of sentences or even essays detailing my unfortunate behavior. At home, I was assigned unpleasant chores, had privileges taken away, or was sometimes told to go to the back yard and select a “switch” from the elderberry bush that grew near the tree house. This long thin branch made a whistling sound as it sliced the air on its way to contact with my bare thighs.
By the time my own children were born, corporal punishment in schools was mostly illegal, and today parents in many places can be prosecuted for striking their children. And regardless of the law, many parents have simply abandoned the practice. It seems like a quaint relic from a past in which people thought children would become better people if they were dealt with severely and without mercy. But even in this gentler age, most of us lack clarity about exactly how to raise children—how to avoid turning them into people who are “rough, course, uncourteous, disobedient.” And there are so many opinions! Absolutely everyone has a perspective about childrearing, whether or not they actually have children themselves. It’s hard to know exactly which methods will “enable [children] to keep the way of the Lord.” Most parents express regret about how they’ve brought their children up; nearly everyone wants a do-over. In a recent interview on NPR, even the famed novelist Toni Morrison confessed that the older she gets, the more she focuses on her mistakes as a mother. “Now that I’m 84, I remember everything as a mistake, and I regret everything.”
As Christian parents, we have every reason to take our responsibility seriously. It’s the most important job we’ll ever have. We believe we are, after all, preparing our children for eternity—to be “lovers of God.” The last thing we want is to make any kind of mistake that might put that at risk. Yet we all recognize that there is only so much control we can ever exercise over our children. Richard Lavoie, a well-known speaker and writer, notes the ineffectiveness of many of the ways we attempt to steer our children, most notably punishment, which “is effective only as long as the threat of punishment exists.” Children who are under the control of adults often “begin to misbehave the moment you leave the room or turn your back.” Obviously, Christian values have to be deeply instilled in individuals so that they develop a sense of ownership of these values. We have to raise our children in such a way that they will adhere to Christian principles even outside of our presence and in the absence of fear of punishment or disapproval.
How do we do this? My own parenting is still a work in progress—and I will not claim to have definitive answers, but I like this quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t . . . do something else.” The important thing is to keep trying, to keep loving, to keep praying, to keep the faith. Ours is a faithful God, and he promises that, “I will contend with those who contend with you, and your children I will save,” (Isaiah 49:25 NIV).
–Becky De Oliveira is a writer, designer, and editor who lives in Boulder.