A couple of weeks ago, we came home from church and as we were making lunch, I asked Taytem what they had learned in children’s church that day.
“Um, we learned about self-control. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was just about control.”
I just about spewed the drink of water out of my mouth, because the statement was so apropos of Taytem. She thinks she’s in charge. She’s been known to actually say aloud, “I know everything,” and “Sometimes grown-ups don’t know a lot,” and she’s constantly trying to correct me. Humble, she’s not.
I confess that I don’t always handle this very well. I mean, who enjoys being constantly corrected by a five-year-old? Who maintains constant patience when your child is interrupting you to finish what she thinks you’re trying to say? And clearly, Taytem gets her ego from me, for I confess, I have been known to retaliate in my most flustered moments, “Oh yeah? You think you know everything? Can you name all of the planets in our solar system? Do you know what a pancreas does? Do you know what the Roman Colosseum is? Because I do!”
It was not my shining moment as a parent. Lukus gave me look that had paragraphs of chastisement written in his eyes. With one glance, I read, “Really? That’s the level you’re going down to? Who’s the adult here? You’re ego is honestly that fragile? Do you actually know what a pancreas does?”
No, my love. I do not “actually” know what a pancreas does. But I do know how to Google it, and Taytem does not. There’s still at least a week before she has that little gem figured out. Then, I’m screwed.
I thought I had my parenting-style figured out. I’d read books on discipline versus punishment, then I read books on training versus discipline, and soaked it all in. I was open to lots of ideas, but I still held fast to my belief in spanking. Spanking was the only thing that worked on me as a kid. If my parents gave me a time-out or grounded me, I just sat in my room growing resentful and pondering all the reasons why my parents were wrong and I was right. There was something about spankings that humbled my heart, reassured me of my parent’s love for me, and the “get-it-over-with” method of discipline helped me move on and cheerfully go about the rest of my day.
Lukus, likewise, grew up with spankings, and considered them effective and appropriate. Our parents weren’t perfect by any means, but we didn’t grow up in fear of them, nor did we ever pick up (what is often the main argument against spanking) hitting others or violent tendencies.
But apart from her huge ego, Taytem is completely different person than me or Lukus. She’s a totally unique human being, which did not occur to me for the first four years of her life. And she did NOT respond well to spankings. We had read the books that taught the proper way to spank a child: be calm, gently tell them what they did wrong, use an instrument like a paddle so they know that your hands are for loving, spank only on the bottom with an appropriate amount of force, expect an apology for their disobedience, then immediately forgive them, give them lots of hugs and reassure them that you’re not angry and you love them.
It was all very controlled and specific. But it started becoming more and more clear that this was not the method for Taytem. I was probably more calm and gentle than my own parents were, and yet she was clearly more afraid than I ever was. And she could not get over the spankings. She would cry and cry until she was almost hysterical, and fortunately, God gave us the grace to set aside our egos and recognize that maybe this was not the path for Taytem.
I wrote in The Mom Tattoo post how I chose to become a mom in order to grow closer to God, to know His father’s heart through my mother’s heart. Often, the Holy Spirit reminds me of this when I feel I’m lacking as a parent – look to your heavenly Father he whispers, what does He do with you?
As I pondered how God treats me as His own daughter, I began to realize that God almost never uses force on me. In His discipline of me, I know there have been times that He has restrained me. He has withheld from me. He has reasoned with me. He has challenged my heart and my attitude. He has used others to correct or expose me. He has let me experience the consequences of my own choices. He’s put me in positions where I had to work extra hard to clean up my own mess. God has never been slow to discipline me when I need it, and I wouldn’t say that He’s always gentle either. But for the life of me, I cannot conjure up any kind of image of some kind of spiritual/figurative spanking.
The more I consider this concept, the more I start to believe that, though God Himself is unchanging, His method of dealing with humankind has changed since Christ came and took our punishment upon Himself. The God of the Old Testament, who struck Miriam with leprosy when she bad-mouthed Moses’ wife, who caused the earth to swallow up Korah when he tried to start a rebellion among the Israelites, and who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt when she disobeyed the angel’s instructions, does not seem to deal so with us any longer. Because He has given us His Spirit through Christ, God appeals to our hearts much more so than punishing the flesh. The punishment of the flesh can only bring about a response from the flesh – the primal instinct to avoid pain, rather than genuine contrition from the heart. Wasn’t this God’s entire point in the whole period that was the Old Testament? External discipline and external obedience is not an obedience of the heart.
I don’t think that means that there’s not any place for spankings. I just think perhaps it’s much more rare and extreme of a measure than I previously thought for my own kid. You have to get to a child’s heart in order to bring about true obedience, but that’s not always going to happen, and sometimes you do have to resort to appealing to their natural instincts in order to spare them from even greater consequences. For some kids, a spanking IS what gets to their heart.
To spare your eyesight, I’m going to stop here and continue this in a Part 2 later this week. I’ll be sharing some thoughts from yet some other great books I’ve read lately and how those approaches have affected our dealings with our little grown-up, smarty-pants, sweet and sensitive Taytem.
In the meantime, whatcha think? Is spanking the only thing that seems to work with your kids like it was with me? Is it a last resort for you? Do you think it’s an act of violence and all spanking is wrong? Let’s talk about it folks, respectfully and honestly – let’s get it all out there.
