Aisle five, a screaming child, and a parent out of options
Almost every parent wants the same thing: a child who grows up happy, decent, and able to stand on his own. For two generations our culture has told parents how to get there, and the results are all around us. There is an older set of instructions, written long before the parenting experts, and it has never needed revising. It is worth hearing, whatever you believe about God.
15The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother.
Proverbs 29:15 · NASB95A tantrum is a test of who is in charge
You have seen it, and if you are a parent you may have lived it. The checkout line is long, the candy is at eye level, and a four-year-old wants it. The answer is no. So he drops to the floor, kicks, and screams until the whole store is looking. The parent stands there, red in the face, and finally bends down: “Okay, okay. Mommy will buy you the candy if you stop crying.”
The crying stops, the parent sighs with relief, and a small boy has just learned the most important lesson of his week. Screaming works. The louder he screams, the faster he gets what he wants. He will use it again tomorrow, and the price will go up.
That parent is not a monster. Nearly always she loves the child very much and simply does not know what else to do, because nobody ever showed her. But love that does not know what to do produces a child who rules the home. He gets his own way, but it does not make him happy. It only makes him want more.
A visitor to America once said that what impressed him most about the country was the way parents obeyed their children.
A schoolteacher described the chain of command like this: the teachers are afraid of the principal, the principal is afraid of the school board, the board is afraid of the parents, the parents are afraid of the children, and the children are afraid of nobody.
Children in charge is nothing new. It was one of the marks of the ruin God said He would bring on Judah: “I will make mere lads their princes, and capricious children will rule over them” (Isaiah 3:4). Children ruling a nation was a mark of God’s judgment on it, and children ruling a home is the same disorder, one house at a time.
And the tantrum in aisle five is only the part that shows. A child who has learned that screaming works learned it at home, and what happens in that store is a picture of what has been happening there.
Why did so many parents stop correcting their children?
For most of history, raising children was not a mystery. Parents taught right from wrong, expected to be obeyed, and corrected a child who defied them. Then the West decided it had outgrown God. America took the Bible out of its schools and out of its public life, and the raising of children passed to experts who started from a different belief: that children are basically good and only need to be affirmed.
21For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools.
Romans 1:21-22 · NASB95
God has put three restraints on human sin. The first is the conscience, God’s law written on every heart. The second is the family, where parents teach their children what is right and correct them when they do wrong. The third is government, which carries the sword. Each one catches what gets past the one before it, and when the family collapses, the whole weight lands on the police.
Romans 2:15 · Proverbs 22:15 · Romans 13:4
The family is the restraint that has collapsed, and that is where we are now. For two generations, fewer children have had a stable home, God’s Word, or consistent discipline. An unruly, disobedient child no longer has anything to fear from his parents, and the result is disorder in the streets.
We have it exactly backwards. We spend our effort on reforming criminals instead of on training children. God’s design is to train the child at home, so that there are far fewer criminals to punish.
Now a whole world of psychologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists is trying to work out how to control a generation of children who are out of control, children who were never raised on the principles of Scripture. You need a doctorate to control a child who was never trained. You do not need one to train him.
Israel raised a generation without God more than three thousand years ago. The one after Joshua grew up not knowing the Lord (Judges 2:10), and Scripture sums up where that led in one sentence: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). A generation that rejects the Word of God and neglects to raise its children by it always ends up the same way, with parents and children alike doing what is right in their own eyes.
Most of what parents are told today rests on five ideas. They all sound modern and morally superior, and after half a century of trying them, every one has failed.
Myth one
Children are born sinners. No parent has ever had to teach a child to lie. Selfishness and deceit appear on their own, often by the age of two, and they are no passing phase: the heart they come from is already sinful. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child” (Proverbs 22:15).
Myth two
A child’s problem is not that he thinks too little of himself. Telling an already selfish child how wonderful he is only adds fuel to the fire. It convinces him he is entitled to his own way, and the idea behind it convinces you that saying no will harm him.
Myth three
God made the father the head of the home (Ephesians 5:23; 1 Timothy 3:4), not the child. A home that revolves around the child, giving him everything his parents never had, creates a small tyrant. The home should not bend to the child; the child should learn to fit into the home.
Myth four
Spanking is not abuse. Brutality is, and it is wrong. But the studies that condemn all spanking usually lump brutal violence together with calm, loving correction, and then blame the spanking for what the violence did.
Myth five
Defiance is not a disease. It takes a lot of time to train a child and very little time to give him a pill. But a drug that calms a defiant child never deals with the defiance. It only postpones it.
Of the five myths, self-esteem spread furthest. The movement began in the 1970s and took root in the 1980s. Parents were told that children who heard how good and special they were would become better people. Parents listened, and a generation raised on affirmation grew up angry, because a child told that he deserves everything meets the first thing he is denied with rage. Even some psychologists have noticed. One professor wrote that if we crossed out self-esteem and put in self-control, children would be better off, and so would society.
The parenting magazines still preach self-esteem: if Johnny refuses to eat his green beans, give him what he wants, and never punish him for expressing himself, because his self-esteem comes first. Meanwhile Johnny learns that the most important thing in life is getting his own way, when he wants it and how he wants it.
Many parents have said it: “It’s just easier to give my kid what he wants than to try to discipline him.” In the moment, it is. But look at what the easy way costs, and who ends up paying for it.
24He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.
Proverbs 13:24 · NASB95
That is strong language, and it is meant to be. God does not call the permissive parent gentle or patient. He says that parent hates the child, because that parent is willing to let the child grow into habits that will ruin him. When a parent says, “I love my child too much to spank him,” what he really loves is his own comfort. He will not suffer the pain of causing his child pain, so the child will suffer a much worse kind later.
Never correcting a child is cruelty, not kindness. It tells him you do not care, and children feel it. An utterly undisciplined child is very often a child who feels utterly unloved.
Giving in buys no peace, only a bigger demand. Some parents try to buy their children’s obedience, loyalty, or respect, and it never works, because a child who is paid to behave is never satisfied. Proverbs has a picture of that kind of appetite: “The leech has two daughters, ‘Give,’ ‘Give’” (Proverbs 30:15).
The police have seen where giving in leads. After years of dealing with delinquents, the Houston Police Department once published a tongue-in-cheek list called “Twelve Rules for Raising Delinquent Children.” It reads like a description of modern parenting: “Begin with infancy to give the child everything he wants. When he picks up bad words, laugh at him. Avoid use of the word ‘wrong.’ It may develop a guilt complex.”
Scripture shows where giving in ends, in the homes of godly men and then in every home.
A priest of God who let his sons do as they pleased. God judged his house “because his sons brought a curse on themselves and he did not rebuke them,” and both sons died on one day (1 Samuel 4:11). Tolerating sin is cruel to children, even in a religious home.
A great king and a weak father. Of his son Adonijah Scripture says, “His father had never crossed him at any time by asking, ‘Why have you done so?’” Adonijah tried to seize his father’s throne, as his brother Absalom had before him.
The child left to get his own way becomes, in the words of Proverbs, a shame to his mother, a grief to his father (Proverbs 17:25), and in the end a disgrace to both (Proverbs 19:26). Proverbs is simply describing what happens.
What happens next is in our headlines. Children who never learned to submit to their parents seldom learn to submit to anyone. A generation of undisciplined, rebellious children tears apart families, then churches, then nations. A society that lets its children grow up undisciplined is breeding anarchy.
God saw that rebellion long before our headlines. In Israel, a son who had grown into settled rebellion was not a private family matter. He was brought before the whole city:
18If any man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father or his mother, and when they chastise him, he will not even listen to them, … 21Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death; so you shall remove the evil from your midst, and all Israel will hear of it and fear.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 · NASB95
This was not a small boy having a bad day. The verses left out call him a glutton and a drunkard, his parents had disciplined him, and he still refused to listen. God called his rebellion evil, to be removed before it spread through the nation. That law was given to Israel’s courts, not to us, and there is no record that the sentence was ever carried out. But it shows how God sees the defiance a parent shrugs off at four. Left alone, it can grow into the son of Deuteronomy 21. Correcting it at four is what a parent can do to keep the child from becoming that son, and it may well save his life, as Proverbs says (Proverbs 23:14).
The alternative to giving in is training, not harshness
When most people hear the word discipline, they think of punishment. The Bible means something much bigger. The Greek word the New Testament uses, παιδεία (paideia), comes from the word for a child and means child training: everything a parent does to shape a child’s soul, correct his mistakes, rein in his desires, and bring him to maturity.
1Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER (which is the first commandment with a promise), 3SO THAT IT MAY BE WELL WITH YOU, AND THAT YOU MAY LIVE LONG ON THE EARTH. 4Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:1-4 · NASB95
That is almost all the New Testament says about parenting, and it is enough. Children have one duty: to obey and honor their parents. Parents have one duty: to give their children discipline and instruction. Everything else is detail. Discipline itself has three parts.
Set the standard
Children need to know clearly what is expected of them. You set the standard, you live by it yourself, and you hold them to it.
Reward the right
Discipline rewards as well as corrects. When God commanded children to honor their parents, He attached a promise, not a threat. Praise and encourage what is good.
Correct the wrong
When the standard is broken, there is a consequence, every time. A child who never feels the consequences of his misbehavior has no reason to change it.
A child is born with a sinful nature. Give that nature rights and entitlements instead of consequences, and it runs straight into chaos.
The rules protect as well as restrain. You forbid a toddler to play in the street, touch the stove, or put a plastic bag over his head, not because of anything he has done, but because you know what will harm him. That is discipline, and it is love.
One thing is never part of discipline: withdrawing your love. Rewards and punishments are never the giving and taking away of affection. A child must always know that the correction is about what he did, and that your love for him is not on the line.
Discipline of this kind is no harsh idea invented by stern people: it is how God Himself treats His own children, for the Lord disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:6). God is not a permissive parent who lets His children do as they please, and He does not want us to be one either.
The Book of Proverbs is a father’s instruction to his son, and it is remarkably direct about how a child is trained. Ask fifteen psychologists how to raise a responsible, moral child and they could talk for months. Proverbs says it in a few lines.
| What Proverbs says | What it means | |
|---|---|---|
| Prov 13:24 | “He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.” | Discipline is an act of love, and so is doing it again when once was not enough. |
| Prov 22:15 | “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him.” | The problem is inside the child, and the rod is what reaches it. |
| Prov 19:18 | “Discipline your son while there is hope, and do not desire his death.” | Start early. It is possible to wait too long. |
| Prov 23:13-14 | “Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die. You shall strike him with the rod and rescue his soul from Sheol.” | He will tell you he is dying. He is not. Sheol is the grave, and the rod is what keeps him from reaching it early. |
| Prov 29:15 | “The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother.” | Correction and explanation go together. The child who always gets his way shames the parent who let him. |
| Prov 29:17 | “Correct your son, and he will give you comfort; he will also delight your soul.” | The end of it is not a broken child but a delightful one. |
It is not complicated. Every child is born foolish. If you want him to be less foolish, correct him, and when words are not enough, use the rod. The rod of Proverbs is what we call a spanking.
Timing matters. “Discipline your son while there is hope.” The years for the rod are the early ones, when defiance first shows itself. There comes a day when he is too big: try it on a sixteen-year-old and he will break the rod over your head.
A spanking is not a long lecture, and it is not an hour in his room to think about what he did. It is brief, it hurts enough to be remembered, and then it is over. Parents who have raised children this way will tell you that a few swats settle what an afternoon of arguing never could. Given the choice between a spanking and a long lecture, many children will take the spanking.
Nothing in Scripture calls for injury. You never need to bruise a child to make your point, and you must never spank in a rage. Do it in private, to spare him humiliation, and do it calmly.
The same verse that commands discipline puts a fence around it: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger” (Ephesians 6:4). Paul, who wrote that letter, says it again in another: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children, so that they will not lose heart” (Colossians 3:21). The goal is a child who is sorry, not a child who is angry: sorry that he hurt someone who loves him, sorry that he dishonored God. An angry child has only learned that you are bigger than he is.
Harshness is the obvious way to provoke a child. The others are better disguised, and several of them look very much like modern parenting.
Cruel
Bitter words, physical cruelty, punishment that relieves an irritated parent instead of helping the child. An angry child is often a beaten one.
Too tight
Never let a child make a mistake, fence him in on every side, and he will decide the only way to any freedom is to rebel.
Too loose
Give him everything he wants, and he grows up with nothing firm to lean on. That insecurity comes out as anger.
Unfair
“Why can’t you be more like your sister?” Isaac favored Esau and Rebekah favored Jacob, their twin sons, and Esau ended up planning to kill his brother (Genesis 27:41).
Crushing
Grades, sports, trophies. When it is really about the parent’s pride, the child learns that nothing he does will ever be enough.
Cold
No time, no praise, no approval. Leaving a child undisciplined is neglect too, however kind it looks.
Consistency matters as much as firmness. If you ignore something three times and punish it hard the fourth, you confuse and exasperate your child. Both parents need to keep the same rules, so the child cannot play one against the other.
Done rightly, discipline hurts the parent too. Many a parent has walked away from a moment of discipline wishing it had not been needed, and then gone back to hold the child. That reluctance is right. It keeps discipline under control, and it is how God Himself feels: “For He does not afflict willingly or grieve the sons of men” (Lamentations 3:33).
Knowing God’s way is not the same as doing it
Every response to a tantrum teaches something. The question is what. Pick the answer you would most likely give, then try the other five and see what each one teaches.
Back to the checkout line. Your four-year-old wants the candy. You said no. He is on the floor, screaming, and people are staring. What do you do?
Try the other answers too.
Give him the candy so he stops
You have just paid him to do it, and the price will rise every time. “A child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother” (Proverbs 29:15).
Years from nowA teenager who knows that enough pressure always moves you.
Promise ice cream later if he is quiet
A bribe teaches that doing right is a deal. Rewards have their place, but a reward offered to end defiance rewards the defiance.
Years from nowA child who asks “What do I get?” before he does anything.
“One… two… two and a half…”
Threats you do not carry out teach a child to wait you out, and they exasperate him, which God forbids a father to do (Colossians 3:21).
Years from nowA child who ignores you until you shout, and then ignores the shouting.
Lose your temper and yank him up
Punishing him to relieve your own irritation is not correction. “The anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).
Years from nowA child who is angry, not sorry, and who fears you instead of respecting you.
Pretend he is not yours
Walking away, or letting the tantrum run its course with no response at all, leaves a child to himself, and that is the child Proverbs warns about: the one who “gets his own way” (Proverbs 29:15) is, in the Hebrew, מְשֻׁלָּח (meshullach), a child let loose and left to himself.
Years from nowA child who concludes that nobody cares enough to stop him.
Calmly carry him out, correct him in private, then hold him
The answer stands. Defiance has a real consequence, delivered calmly and away from an audience. Then it is over, and he is held and forgiven. “Correct your son, and he will give you comfort” (Proverbs 29:17).
Years from nowA child who tests you less and less, because he knows two things for certain: your word stands, and your love does too.
Carrying a screaming child out calmly, correcting him in private, and then holding him does not require a perfect parent. It requires deciding who the parent is and then acting like it, lovingly and consistently, day after day. Here is what that looks like at home.
God gave you authority over your child for his good. Your child does not obey by nature. He has to be taught, and he has to be corrected for disobedience and disrespect. That is your job, not his teacher’s, his coach’s, or the state’s.
Five rules enforced every time are better than fifty enforced when you feel like it. Give an instruction once, calmly. Then follow through the same way every time, with both parents saying the same thing.
Children quickly learn to obey on the outside while defying you on the inside: the rolled eyes, the heavy sigh, the sullen “fine.” Deal with the attitude. Caught early, it need not grow into the act.
Tell your child plainly that the punishment will be far worse if he lies about something than if he tells the truth. A child who hates lying has a guard against every other temptation, because he cannot sin and cover it up.
Never in anger and never in public. Explain what he did and why it matters, carry out the consequence, and then it is finished. Do not drag it out, and do not bring it up again.
Hold him afterward, tell him you love him, and forgive him fully. A child should grow up surrounded by discipline and by forgiveness, and the two belong together.
Praise honestly and often, reward obedience, and give him your time. A child who is secure in your love can take your correction.
Whatever you want in your children, they have to see in you. You cannot discipline a child into honesty while he hears you lie on the phone. Parents who do not discipline themselves cannot discipline their children.
A well-behaved child still needs a Savior
Biblical parenting aims at the child’s heart, and that is where it parts company with every technique on the market. A polite child is not the goal, nor is a child who says “yes, sir” on cue, makes his parents look good, or is merely under control. Parents who work only on outward behavior can end up raising skilled little hypocrites, children who behave when someone is watching and do as they please when no one is.
The real problem is the heart, and no parent can change a heart. “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Only God can change it, and that is why every act of discipline is also a chance to point the child to Him. A child who has just been corrected is ready to hear that his disobedience was not only against Mom and Dad but against a holy God, and that he needs God’s forgiveness too. That forgiveness comes through Jesus Christ, who “came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15).
6These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. 7You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 · NASB95
You cannot save your children. What you can do is bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, point them to Christ at every turn, and pray. The rest belongs to God, and He is very good at it.
Why trust an ancient book on raising children?
Look at what has happened. For fifty years the experts told parents not to spank, to build self-esteem, and to let children express themselves, and the results are in. Research points the other way. Researchers at Harvard once set out to learn what keeps a child from becoming a delinquent. They found four things:
Scripture said all of it thousands of years ago.
That should make anyone wonder. If the Bible was right about your children when the experts were wrong, what else might it be right about? Marriage, money, work, suffering, death? The Bible is not an old book of rules but the instruction of the One who designed the family in the first place and knows exactly how it works.
24Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock.
Matthew 7:24 · NASB95
There is a way that seems right to us, the Bible warns, “but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12). Parents feel that in their bones when they watch a child slipping away. The answer is a different foundation, not a stricter technique.
Behind the Bible’s instructions for parents stands God, and He is a Father. He disciplines the children He loves, not to crush them but so that they may share His holiness (Hebrews 12:10). He is also the father in Jesus’ story who saw his rebellious son coming home from a long way off, “and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). That is the kind of parent He asks you to be, firm and tender at once, because it is the kind of Father He is.
“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him” (James 1:5). Every parent lacks wisdom. God makes that promise to His children, and He invites every parent to become one.
If you have read this far, you may be feeling the weight of what you have read. Perhaps you have been the parent in aisle five. Perhaps your children are older now, and you wonder whether it is too late. The years for the rod may be behind you, but it is never too late to start doing what is right, and never too late to come to God.
A hard truth of parenting is that you cannot give your children what you do not have. You cannot teach them to revere God if you do not know Him, or point them to forgiveness you have never received. So begin with God. Open a Bible, read the Gospel of John, and read a chapter of Proverbs a day. Ask God to show you the truth about yourself and about Him, and to give you the faith to believe it. Jesus’ invitation still stands: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). And He promised that no one who comes asking is turned away: “For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened” (Luke 11:10).
The same God who tells you how to raise your children offers to become your Father. He corrects those He loves, He forgives completely everyone who comes to Him, and He never gives in, because He never stops loving.
Correct your son, and he will give you comfort; he will also delight your soul.Proverbs 29:17
After John MacArthur preached on disciplining children, a boy of eight or nine from his church sent him a note. It read: “I really liked your message on disciplining kids. One day while getting spanked my Dad broke his stick. A few days later I decided to make him a new stick. It ended up being bigger than I wanted it to be.”
He was not a frightened child. He knew exactly where he stood, and he knew he was loved.
