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IT IS Possible to Discipline a Child Without Spanking

When I started out on this parenting journey, I didn't know it at the time, but I was carrying a lot of "baggage" with me. I grew up in a home where I was told that my parents spanked me because they loved me. I became so accepting of this form of discipline that I would willingly come to them to be spanked when I'd done wrong. So when I became a parent, I believed firmly that children need to be spanked when they disobey in order to know right and wrong, and be able to obey God when they grow up. I searched for the "proper and Biblical" way to spank my child, and came across the "spank and comfort" method. I concluded then that my parents' spanking wasn't wrong, they just made the mistake of not following through with comforting (didn't show me grace). So, I thought that if I follow the "spank and comfot" method, balancing punishment with grace, I'd prevent my children from becoming bitter like I became as a result of my parents' spanking me.

Note: For simplicity sake, I will only talk about my firstborn, even though I have 5 children. Obviously, the successive children are benefitting from the things that I had learned from parenting my firstborn. Poor Gawain, he's like a guinea pig in my parenting experiement. :-(

My firstborn was a rather compliant toddler, so I rarely spanked him when he was small, and the times that I did, I assumed I did right because he became obedient. (I thought that the result justified the method.) When he was about 5 or so, he started to throw tantrums that not only embarrassed me, but brought on a lot of criticism about my parenting as well. These tantrum episodes would have no pattern to them, he'd be perfectly fine and well-behaved one moment, and the next, Boom! He's blowing up! We never did find out exactly what caused these tantrums, though there had been medical tests done on him that showed borderline ADD. Dh and I did everything we could to get him to stop throwing tantrums, including spanking, but nothing worked. I lost control many times and spanked him (sometimes too severely) after he threw a tantrum. After I spanked him, he would withdraw from me when I wanted to comfort him. The more I reached out to him, the more he went the other way. He got to the point where he didn't want comfort from either me or my husband. And as he got bigger, not only would he withdraw from us, but he would hit us back when we try to comfort him. This really got me to reconsider my position about the "spank and comfort" method.

Now, someone might be thinking, "Well, your child was too old for you to be using spanking by then--it only worked with children younger than 5 (or whatever age)." Let me say here that I was seeing the same reaction from my second and third children (4 and 6 years younger than the oldest). And they didn't learn it from their older brother because we spanked them individually in private, so they couldn't have seen how they each reacted to the spanking.

Anyway, while all this was going on, God was also in the process of teaching me about His grace. I grew more and more secure in His love for me, and relied less and less on others' approval to give me the security that I needed. God showed me that He is gentle and loving toward me, and would never do anything that would cause me to withdraw from Him. There had been natural consequences of my sins that I had mistaken as God's "spanking", but He never spanked me. In fact, He was there beside me, holding me, while I thought he was "spanking" me. You see, God showed me that I had transfered my experience with my parents onto God. Because I was spanked by my parents when I failed to meet their expectations, I assumed that God also "spanked" me when I failed to meet His expectations. Because I was convinced that spanking a child is loving, I assumed that God also loved me by "spanking" me. I have learned that this is far from the truth.

I don't know about other parents who spank, but I know that for me, the Lord convicted me that I wasn't showing His grace to my children when I spanked them. He showed me that I was too performance oriented, and was making my children perform for me; that a lot of times, I spanked them out of my own feeling of insecurity. I was using spanking as a mean to control them. For example, I was embarrased that my child disobeyed me in front of people I was trying to impress with his "good behavior," so I punished him for embarrassing me. And what about disobedience in the privacy of our home where there's nobody to impress? Well, that's practice for public behavior isn't it? So, I punished them just the same, so that they'd know how to behave in public. God said it bluntly to me that if He had spanked me every time that I had disobeyed and embarrased Him, I would have been dead. (Remember that God's standard is perfection, not only in action, but in thoughts as well! And any mature Christian knows well that after a while it becomes easier to control our outward behavior, but it's impossible to control the sinful thoughts that pop into our mind. And according to God's standard, it is just as sinful to think sinful thoughts as it is to have physically carried out the deed.)

God showed me that "a child's withdrawing from the parent who had just spanked him" is a God-given sign to the parent that the child's spirit has been wounded. In a very young child, you can coax them into accepting the parent back, because instintively, the child knows that he's dependent on the parent and wants to have his needs met. So, if the parent insists on "comforting" him, he will repress his feelings, and do what the parent wants him to do (talk to him, hug him, etc.), especially if this was the only pattern of discipline that the child knows. How long the child will continue to repress his feelings depends on other aspects of the parent-child relationship. If the other aspects of their relationship makes the child feel secure enough, the child will eventually try to communicate to the parent that his spirit is wounded (start withdrawing again at some point), or talk to the parent. If the child never confront the parent, or if he confronts the parents and they continue to justify why they were right in spanking the child, then the child's feelings will again be repressed, and become a seed of bitterness in the child, which will show up later in adolescence as "rebellion" or in adulthood as "poor choices in life."

I believe that God has given my child extra measures of courage and stubbornness in order to confront me on this issue. By God's grace, I had worked through enough of the issues in my life that I was secure enough to listen to criticisms. Also, because I had worked through many issues, I was able to build a relationship with my son where he felt safe to confront me. So, when he was old enough to express himself about the deeper issues of life (about 9 years old), he talked to me about spanking, and poured his heart out to me. I realized then how much I had wounded his spirit, and repented before God and him. We cried and reconciled with each other. I longed so much to turn back the clock so I could parent him all over again, but knew that I couldn't. I could only change the future. . . I could only help him heal from the wounds, and do better with the other children, all with God's grace.

Paul and I humbly asked the Lord to show us other methods of discipline besides spanking, and I'm glad to say that He has been faithful to give us wisdom. I'm suprised at some of the ideas that popped into my head sometimes! Like substituting weeding for spanking. I give them a bucket, and they are to fill the bucket with weeds that they pull from a designated spot in the backyard. Works great--get some of my work done for me, and teach them a lesson at the same time! (I admit this only works on fair-weather days though. Hmm. . . maybe this is when I can get them to scrub the toilet. LOL!)

Still convinced at the time that spanking is sometimes necessary, Paul and I then reserved spanking for the "really bad" behavior, or when the child continues to be disobedient after other forms of discipline had been tried. We made an effort to think of other forms of discipline before actually spanking the children. Over time, we spanked less and less, because the children were responsive to other forms of discipline. And you know something? I can't remember the last time I spanked the kids now. Those of you who've been on PAM (Parenting as Ministry E-mail List) for about a year, you might recall that I posted before that I spanked my kids. Well, I don't anymore. :-)

Are my children more obedient now that I don't spank them? I don't know. I still have to discipline them often. However, I can say that they're not anymore disobedient than they were before. Everywhere we go, we keep getting compliments about our children. But that's just icing on the cake. The real improvement in our lives has been that there are no more walls between the children and us. Do we still struggle with discipline? Yes! But, a lot of tension has been removed from our home. The kids know when they've disobeyed, and they accept the consequence of their disobedience without all the crying and angry outbursts. They occasionally protest, but over all know that we're fair to them. We give them the freedom to appeal to us, and when they do, we listen. Many times we have changed the punishment to better fit the crime (i.e., reducing the weeding from 3 buckets to 2).

It's interesting that a lot of the "rebellious" behaviors slowly disappeared. I believe that a lot of those defiant behaviors was a reaction to my husband and I trying to control them. And what was happening was that the more we exerted control, the more they pushed against us, and the more we punished. What a vicious cycle! God has shown us that our motive for parenting shouldn't be "keeping our children under control," but to "encourage them to Christlikeness." My guess is that the children haven't changed much, but our perception of them has changed. I believe God has given Paul and I His perception of the children.

Incidentally, our son hasn't thrown any tantrums since my husband and I changed our view on spanking. Coincidence? Don't know. Some people would say that our son was going through a phase in his development and just happened to outgrow it at that time. I only know in my spirit that God has used my child's tantrums to break me and teach me another lesson about grace; and when the lesson was over, the tantrums ended. (Being a stubborn mule that I am, it took nearly 5 years before God got through! Ugh!)

In conclusion, I have learned from my own expeience that IT IS possible to discipline a child without spanking. The reason some children are unruly isn't because they're not spanked, but because they weren't disciplined. "Spanking" and "discipline" are not synonymous, nor is "spanking" synonymous with "abusing" or "bullying." It is not necessarily true that a parent who doesn't spank is neglecting to discipline a child; conversely, it isn't necessarily true that a parent who spanks is abusing a child. I have to give the Christian parents who spank the benefit of the doubt that they are following God's direction in their lives; just as I would expect them to trust that God is leading me. Perhaps they don't have the same problem I did in being out of control with the spanking. But for me, after God has shown me how I was wounding my children by over spanking them, I would rather not spank at all, than to "over do it" even once.

Looking back over the past 11.5 years of my parenting experience, it seems that the more I grew in my understanding of God's grace, the less I felt like spanking my children. And now, as I continue to grow in my understanding of how creative (and even humorous at times!) God is in disciplining me, the more creative I become in disciplining my own children.

God bless,

Sophie, who's still growing in God's grace everyday.

This was originally a post to PAM--the Parenting as Ministry Mailing List. Used by permission of author.

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