By Dr Oladapo
I will approach this discourse by adopting a Q and A template to attempt at deconstructing an age long operating system on parenting that I personally consider very defective. I appeal to you to approach digesting this piece from a very disabused and free minded point of view to afford you the opportunity to reference your response from an objective frame of reasoning.
Question 1
• Does discipline have a place in Godly parenting and management of the heritages of God?
Answer
• The answer is a capital YES. The Words Discipline and Disciple incidentally came from the Latin root word 'Disciplinare' which means to teach or instruct. There are 3 different levels of discipline. The Bible fully supports the principle of “disciplinare”. It is instructive to note the close linkage between the word discipline and disciples. This is very critical to further exploratory analysis of the first question and the understanding of how Jesus shepherded 12 disciples in the days of his ministry. God disciplines his children and punishes the wicked. For discipline to comply to God’s operating system it must be in love.
The first level of discipline is INSTRUCTION- This has two sub components;
•“What to do and not to do” and
• “Why it should be done or not to be done”.
Often times in life we were given a laundry list as it were ( by our parents/guardians/life instructors or our different moral institutions) of what to do and not to do, but rarely “why we can do them or cannot do them”. This breeds a body of knowledge founded on fear of repercussion devoid of motivational understanding that should drive compliance when the custodians of the instructions are absent. This is very common with the instructions many of us received earlier on in life from our parents who told us not to sit on the pounded yam mortar but were never told the reason for this.
Rather they attached an element of superstitious repercussion to the instruction as a way of generating required compliance that further heightened the fear factor around the instruction/message rather than deepen the internalization of its essence.
The second Level of discipline is Training
Training is the art of believing that our audience is able to achieve a certain level of proficiency in an area of desired competence through deliberate exposure to training aids that will reinforce the desired knowledge, encourage the use of the skills and development of the right attitude. All of these are also very relevant in the training of children and their use and practice have been well documented. Training must always aim to reinforce positive behaviours
The Third Level is Correction.
• This focuses on discouraging undesired behaviours through a system that removes the reinforcements for the undesired behaviours and discourages the practice of the undesired behaviours in children.
Question 2-
• Does God sanction physical use of the “Rod” in correcting Children?
Answer
• There are many biblical references where the use of the rod was advocated in disciplining a child in the OT especially the book of proverbs. The question that remained unanswered however is whether it is right to beat children in enforcing discipline.
• I strongly believe that beating or the use of a cane, horse whip and the likes are for animals (e .g horses) which cannot respond to reason. This does not by any means equate to effective discipline in any way but rather represents the exploitation and abuse of children who are helplessly defenseless. This becomes evident as they grow up physically and we drastically refrain from the use of force in reprimanding them when they err (not out of respect for their ability to reason but more out of the fact that our undue physical advantage over them has evened out over time and there is a possibility of reversals of position) but resort to appealing to their reasoning capacity, an approach that they are sometimes not used to, haven been accustomed to the language of the whip.
The price such parents pay in my view for not properly bringing up their children 'in the way they should go' while they are tender and their faculties are like sponges by devoting quality time to their instruction, training and engagement in the values they subscribe to and also being available to model the behaviours that support their tutorials is that they lose them to the tempestuous force of the fairwind of life and its vagaries, which only can be tamed albeit unsuccessfully by the scourge of a whip.
To further buttress these points lets answer the following 13 posers;
1. Are children the only ones who have foolishness bound in their hearts? Could it be possible that adults also have a greater dimension of foolishness within them?
2. Can children reason?
3. Which of these two is more trainable? Children or Adults?
4. How much training, instruction and coaching did you receive at work to be able to carry out a particular function in the past? Why were you not beaten physically when you failed to achieve a milestone?
5. Why are we not physically beating adults who have demonstrated a high proficiency level in foolishness e.g a man or woman caught in adultery or an adult who accidentally spilled a cup of water on the rug or an adult who having been drunk wets his bed or a man who through over speeding had a bad accident?
6. How many of us had any formal instruction on parenting beyond our own immediate developmental experience with our parents?
7. Can we achieve discipline without physically resorting to beating children?
8. If your Children are as big as you are (probably at 15 years of age) will you be able to still beat them?
9. How do you determine what the measure/dose of beating is scripturally acceptable for children are and what constitutes abuse?
10. Was it the physical beating you got or the correction through instruction you received that made you to change in life?
11. Did Jesus physically beat his disciples to train them and could some of them have exhibited childish tendencies?
12. Where is the place of the word of God in counseling, training, and cleansing?
13. What qualifies any human to beat another human being or to be beaten for the purpose of correction?
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