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Parenting – Balancing Discipline With Love
I've watched several families raise their kids, and then we have raised our kids too.
My wife and I have been through growing kids God's way and we were both raised in a strict Christian home.
I've noticed that the families with lots of rules and parents that are often unhappy, end up with kids that go off the deep end after high school or college.
And the Christian families that understand God's grace and mercy and apply it to raising kids, end up with kids that walk close to the Lord all their life.
The Bible teaches that the “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” And it also teaches “Perfect Love casts out fear”.
In raising kids our goal as parents should be to start out with discipline and love and as soon as possible develop a relationship with our kids so that they obey and want to please us out of love for us and love for God. And so the need for discipline diminishes and even though there are still some rules. And most of the rules are ones that the parents keep to. For example when we go to bed, and when we get up.
Some parents have a difficult time developing a good relationship with their kids, because the parents are not happy and therefore the kids also learn to not be happy. Even though these parents are Christians and love God, they don't walk in the Spirit and so their emotional weaknesses cause them to be unhappy at times.
It seems from observing my parents that if a person had a happy childhood and happy parents, then they tend to be happy.
For example during the years I lived at home growing up, it seemed my mom was a much happier person than my dad.
Then later when I learned their childhood experiences, I realized that my mom had a happy childhood and my dad had a very difficult childhood.
My mom was raised in an upper middle class home during the depression. Her dad was an engineer for AT&T. He chose to live out in the country and commute to work so that his family could enjoy the country life. He must have been a happy man and married to a happy wife, because my mother has fond memories of growing up. In studying her and my dad I've concluded that my mother was much happier and self-confident because she had a happy childhood.
My dad was also raised during the depression, but his mom and dad both worked in factories, and were gone from 5 in the morning until about 7 at night, and so he raised his younger siblings. The commute time for his parents to go to work was about 2 hours too and from work and so he rarely saw his parents. Then his mom died of cancer in her forties. And so his childhood was very stressed out, which to me explains why he was not as happy and self-confident as my mom during my growing up years.
In conclusion, as parents we should try to be happy parents and not argue and try to teach our kids God's love by example and try and develop a relationship with our kids so that they do the right things because of their love for God and for us, instead of rules.
I've seen kids raised in strict Christian families where the parents were not happy and the parents did not model God's love for us, and the kids turned away from God.
So how can a parent become happy when they had a rough childhood? The answer lies in understanding their place here in life. If they understand that as a Christian they are here to glorify God and serve their family and others and that God is pleased with them if they will do this and be happy doing it, then I think this helps tremendously.
It seems that when someone is not happy, it is either they feel mistreated or they are not content with what they have.
Another way to say this is that they are either complaining about someone or complaining about something.
And so if the person is a Christian and has decided to be content with what they have, and they have decided to be a peacemaker and let God settle scores with people who wrong them, then they will be happy with what they have and they will not be complainers.
And when someone does not live up to their expectations they will not be upset, but rather they will be loving to the person understanding that God wants them to help the person grow by showing them unconditional love.
And when it comes to raising kids they will try and make the rules as unrestricted as possible and build a good relationship with the kids and teach the kids more by modeling God's love and God's ways of living rather than by making rules about things.
We have raised our kids this way and so they don't watch TV, because we don't watch TV, and they understand TV is not necessary to have a happy life. They don't listen to non-Christian music because they like Christian music and we don't listen to non-Christian music and they know that Christian music is more glorifying to God, and they want to glorify God with their life. And they want to serve God with their life, because we are serving God with our life. And even though I have a job and my wife is home with the kids, the kids want to serve God full time because we serve him with as much as we can with our spare time. They talk a lot about spiritual things because we talk a lot about the Bible and spiritual things.
The Bible says, “We love Him because He first loved us …” And we could say that “Our kids love God because we love God.” I guess that's what the verse means that says, “Train up a child in the way he should go and he wouldn't deviate from it.”
So discipline is important, but love and modeling God's ways of living are far more important, if you want to really end up with kids that love God. But for this to work you need to be true dedicated Christians and live the way God wants you to and you have to be happy so that you can maintain a good healthy relationship with your spouse and kids – otherwise you may lose their respect.
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