I encourage parents to make the discipline of their young children as liturgical as possible. How can discipline be a liturgy? What is a liturgy of discipline?
Discipline should be consistent not only in that parents discipline for the same offenses, but in that discipline should be carried out in a regimented way. Basically: Give the same discipline in the same way for the same offense every time.
Parents should always be clear about their expectations. They should not ask a question when they are intending to give a command. That just creates confusion. Don’t say, “Billy, do you want to eat your peas?” Say, “Billy, eat your peas.” (Moms have a harder time with this than dads since men typically communicate in more direct ways and women in more interrogative ways.) Never say, “Billy, do you want a spanking?” Give your command. If they don’t obey immediately and cheerfully, you have a disciplinary situation on your hands.
When the child sins, the sin and punishment should both be named. The child should know exactly what’s coming and why. He should confess his sin. He should know how many swats are coming. Obviously, how this happens changes a great deal from the earliest periods of discipline to when the child gets older. At one year old, you might say “No” and pop a child’s hand for dropping food off his high chair. When the child is a bit older and it’s going to be a real spanking, you will take the child to a private place and make sure he understands why he is being disciplined.
If you discipline your child at the first manifestation of sin, you will still be emotionally in control and not just doing discipline because you finally got irritated. Parenting is not for the faint of heart or the lazy. It requires diligence and vigilance to parent well.
When you have administered discipline in a private place, give the child a few moments to compose himself. Comfort him. Tell him you love him. Pray with him, asking God’s forgiveness and help. Hug your child and make sure fellowship is restored. With my kids, after a spanking, I would declare absolution and usually use the same form of words we used in church on Sundays (sometimes we’d keep bulletins in the bathroom for this purpose – so they could connect the discipline/forgiveness with what would happen in Lord’s Day covenant renewal worship). I would then do this short fill-in-the-blank type catechism with them (I would ask the questions and the child would answer):
Are you a sinner? Yes.
What do you deserve because of your sin? Death and hell.
Are you going to hell when you die? No.
Why not? Because Jesus died on the cross for my sins.
And now Jesus is…..King of kings and Lord of lords.
Once it was clear the child was back in fellowship with the parent and with God, the discipline episode was finished.
A few notes:
1. Doing discipline this way makes it an opportunity to not just train the child in righteousness but reinforce his covenantal identity. (Baptists obviously cannot do this the same way as we Presbyterians, but it’s an important aspect of discipline imo.) The fact that God loves the child and forgives the child is impressed upon him. The fact that he expected to live a certain way, not just because mom and dad say so, but because he is a child of God, gets reinforced.
2. Tying discipline to catechesis of some sort puts discipline in a teaching/training context every time and not just a correcting/rebuking context.
3. Making sure fellowship is really restored is crucial even if it sometimes means the disciplinary episode is going to take more time. The relationships involved are the key to everything.
4. The entire task of parenting, especially discipline, should be wrapped up in faith in God’s covenant promises. Parental discipline is a work that arises from and expresses faith in the core covenant promise, “I will be a God to you and to your children.”
—
What makes parental discipline (the rod) effective is not merely the discipline in itself, but the cultural context of the home in which that discipline takes place.
If the home is a miserable place and the child disobeys, the rod is just one more form of misery. There is no fellowship to restore after the episode of discipline because there was no real fellowship beforehand. There is no obvious connection between obedience and blessing because the home is not a very blessed place. Usually, the root of the problem in these cases is marital, not parental. If mom and dad don’t enjoy each other and have fun together and treat each other with a generous kindness, the spiritual vibe of the home will be pretty negative, and the kids will sense it and suffer because of it. Many disciplinary problems with the kids would best be dealt with by improving the marriage. The marriage relationship is always the bedrock on which the rest of the household culture rests. It’s very difficult to do a good job raising children when the marriage is in bad shape. The way your children turn out has as much to do with what is caught as what is taught.
On the other hand, if the home is a generally happy place – because mom and dad love each other and love their kids – then discipline will be effective. The pain of the discipline will not just be physical, but relational, because the child will realize his sin excluded him from and disrupted something truly wonderful. Happily married parents will usually produce a happy home with happy kids. If you want your kids to spent time with you once they are grown, they need to have fond memories of the home culture in which they grew up, and that culture flows out of the marriage relationship. A mom and dad who love one another, serve one another, flirt with one another, and he really make the home a pleasant place to be will usually not have any problem staying close to their children when they are grown. They have given their children a marital and familial model worthy of imitation.
Also, when a marriage is dysfunctional because love and respect have broken down, mom and dad are tempted to use the children as pawns in a game of mutual manipulation. Who does what with the kids becomes a war. Time and energy that could be poured into forming and molding the children is wasted on marital conflict. The home can’t grow in godliness because the marriage is mired in conflict.
All that to say: the old cliche, “The best thing you can do for your child is love his/her mom/dad” is exactly right.
—
The most important earthly work we do in this life is raise our children. Everything else we do, except for the worship of God, is subordinate to this end, and even the worship of God includes it.
Christian parents must recognize this. It does not matter how successful you are, how much you accomplish in work or ministry, how much wealth you accumulate, how many public accolades you get, how much fame you attain — if your children turn against you and/or turn away from the Lord, it’s all for naught. What good would it do to have millions of dollars in middle age or in your later years, if your children hate you or hate the Lord? What good would a mountain house or lake house be if your kids are estranged from you or from Jesus? What good is a family vacation if your family ends up spiritually fractured?
Obviously, in God’s providence, there are hard situations. I’m not trying to make Christian parents with apostate children feel worse than they already do. Some cases of children who grew up in Christian homes and later apostatized are tough because it can *look* like the parents did everything right. But I’m not concerned here with those difficult cases. I’m much more concerned with helping young Christian parents and parents-to-be focus on the task at hand so they can do it well and experience the full blessings of God’s multi-generational covenant.
Here’s what’s frustrating: Many Christian parents do not take their parental responsibilities all that seriously. And many churches do not help them take those responsibilities seriously. The results speak for themselves: all too many children raised in Christian homes are lost to the world.
Given the reality that having apostate children is perhaps the greatest trial any Christian can deal with, it’s shocking that so many churches give so little time and energy to training parents how to raise their children biblically. Perhaps no other issue (other than marriage, which is equally important in this way) factors into our earthly happiness than our relationship with our children. “Once you are a parent, you can never be happier than your least happy child,” as the old saying goes. But how much teaching do most Christian parents get in their churches about the promises God makes to parents? How much teaching do they get on covenant succession? How much instruction is there about the multi-generational nature of God’s covenant? How much teaching do parents get concerning what it means to raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? Or what the Bible says about education and discipline? Or inheritance? The stakes are so high, yet much of the church seems to invest so little.
Certainly a great deal of earthly joy is lost because so many Christians parents simply don’t know what they are doing. So much kingdom growth is lost, since when we lose our children to the world, the aim of creating Christian culture and civilization is made impossible. And of course, souls are lost through parental neglect.
In general, Christian parents need to be more diligent and more sacrificial. They need to be more conscientious when it comes to making decisions about discipline and education. And pastors and church leadership need to make teaching and preaching on wise and faithful parenting a priority. Parenting cannot be outsourced – God holds parents (especially fathers) responsible for how they nurture and train their children, and no one can take this task off their plate. But churches (especially pastors) have a responsibility to help parents as they undertake this massive work.
—
You should raise your children with your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in view.
—
Parenting advice:
Start with trusting God’s covenant promises to believing parents. Claim those multigenerational promises. Pray those promises. Rest on those promises.
Obviously, thinking multigenerationally will impact all kinds of things, including the kinds of churches, schools, and other institutions we build. It will shape discipline, entertainment standards, and a host of other things. It means we will be involved in our kids’ dating/courting relationships and help them vet a potential spouse. Etc.
—
I made up a lot of catechisms to use when my kids were little. For example, before dinner we did this a lot of evenings:
Who are the Lusks? A family saved by grace!
Who do the Lusks fear? God alone!
Who do the Lusks trust? The Lord Jesus!
Let’s pray…
After a spanking, we did this one:
Are you a sinner? Yes
What do you deserve because of your sin? Death and hell
Are you going to hell when you die? No
Why not? Because Jesus died on the cross for my sins
And now Jesus is…..King of kings and Lord of lords.
That was always a good way to end a discipline session make sure they were back in fellowship.
On the Lord’s Day, before lunch (though we never actually did this one much):
What is today? The Lord’s day
Why do we worship and feast this day? Because Jesus rose from the dead
Why do we give thanks? Because everything we have comes from God
Let’s pray…
Before bed, this was our routine:
Prayer/Lord’s Prayer
Doxology (sung)
Lutheran cross [With the palm of the right hand held flat with thumb and fingers together, first the forehead is touched (“The Lord Jesus Christ came down from heaven”), then the center of the chest (“and was incarnate for me”), the right shoulder (“and was crucified for me”), and finally the left shoulder (“and now lives in my heart”). Luther recommends the use of this sign in both the Small and the Large Catechism.] See http://pastorgeorgespicer.blogspot.com/2011/12/making-sign-of-cross.html.
I should mention that John Calvin also has a young children’s catechism:
http://www.joelgarver.com/writ/hist/calvin.htm
With my catechism, I skipped around when my kids were little. I did questions 1-7, then a few from the sections that deal with the OT, like 42 (they loved to do the whole sacrificial thing with stuffed animals and a toy knife), then a few other ones like 72-78, 81-82, 88-89, and 98-100.
TPC Pastor's Page 