nd you, fathers . . . bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4).
Doing something wrong, or backwards, does not take much preparation or thought. A very common example of this is seen in how many parents think about the transition of their children from infancy to the teenage years.
The problem looks like this: When a child first comes into the home, he is small and cute. Although the Bible tells us that we are all sinners by nature, it most certainly does not look this way to us as we are joyfully bending over the crib. Because the child is cute, it is often the case that his sin is "cute" to us as well. Because of this, and because his sin doesn't damage anything much, parents do not discipline effectively for multitudes of "little sins." But the years go by, very quickly, and the parents are soon confronted with a child who is capable of getting pregnant, or getting someone pregnant, getting arrested, buying drugs, and so on. In short, the child is now of sufficient size to wreck his life. In a panic, his parents attempt to institute a regime of strict discipline. Not surprisingly, this provokes even more rebellion. What went wrong?
The text above says that fathers are to bring their children up in the training and admonition of the Lord. The verb translated here as bring up also means to nourish up to maturity, or nurture. This cannot be done without intelligent oversight of the entire growing process. The goal of child-rearing must be Christian maturity displayed in our children. This goal must be in the minds of the parents long before it is reached. It must be in mind from the beginning.
The Bible requires fathers to exercise this kind of intelligent oversight of their children as they grow. The critical years in this process are the early ones. An oak sapling can be bent with very little effort; if fifty years are added, it will be an entirely different story. So why do so many Christian parents let the saplings in their home grow without strict pruning, and then when all the problems with their folly are manifest in the form of a huge twisted oak, they then try to shape the tree? The answer is that many Christian fathers are foolishly disobeying Ephesians 6:4.
Instead of loose tolerance when the kids are little, and clamping down as they grow older, a biblical approach is just the reverse. Small children should live in a totalitarian police state at home. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction will drive it far from him (Prov. 22:15). The smaller a child is, the more decisions should be made for him.
Conversely, the older the children are, the fewer the external restrictions there should be. As a child is being reared properly, he should experience greater and greater freedom. This is possible because early strict discipline works, and has by now been internalized.
The easy mistake to make is that of indulging children when they are small, and cracking down on them as they grow. Instead
of this, parents should be super-strict with little ones, and gradually remove restrictions as the children mature. The teenage years are no time to institute strict discipline.
In other words, when a child is small, he should not be burdened with responsibilities. When a child is older, he should not be burdened with restrictions.
When our children were young, we would discipline for things that many would consider "little." For example, one infraction that could bring about a spanking would be whining. This might cause some readers to roll their eyes heavenward -- "If we disciplined for whining, we would have to discipline every ten minutes for the next twenty years!" The first part is quite true -- one might have to do this every ten minutes, especially if there has been parental indulgence of the sin of whining. But it does not have to be done for twenty years. It only has to be done consistently for two or three days, at which time the whining will stop.
Many parents might wonder, however, whether their two-year-old can understand the connection between the discipline and the whining. "I don't know if he understands . . ." This concern can be addressed with a simple question -- does this two-year-old understand the connection between his whining and whatever it is he wants? The answer of course is yes. Such an understanding is why he whines. This means that the child is fully capable of understanding the nature of cause and effect, and is therefore capable of understanding the discipline. The reason he still whines is because he is not disciplined for it.
Obviously, this should not be done from some dictatorial need to boss kids around. This kind of strict discipline when children are little is self-sacrificial. It is much easier on "self" to let things go. The purpose of such discipline is so that it will not be necessary to exercise strict discipline later, after it has become extremely difficult -- or impossible.
Although we disciplined for many "small" things, as our children have grown, we have given them greater and greater freedom as we have seen them mature. For example, when the children were younger, we had strict standards concerning entertainment. There have been many times when our younger children were not permitted to watch a movie that other Christian kids were watching -- on video at a birthday party, for example.
But when she was sixteen, we told our oldest daughter that she was now free to make her own decisions on whether to watch a film with her friends or not. There was no longer any need to "phone home." We did not do this because objectionable movies are now all right to watch (they are not), but because we can now trust her to make good choices. The irony is that she now has been given a much greater freedom in this than many of her friends from less strict homes.
The sum of the matter is this. When other young children are cruising the neighborhood without restraint, your children should be at their home -- Camp Pendleton. And ten years later, when the kids in the neighborhood are all getting grounded, yours should finally be getting airborne.
