You may not agree with what you are about to read. And that is ok. You need to find what works at your house. My job today is to simply introduce you to the way we choose to discipline our children.
Meet “The Rod”….
You know, as in “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”
(Adapted Proverbs 13:24 “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”)
Phase II of our Discipline is introducing “The Rod”.
Here’s how it goes down at our house:
#1 The child makes a wrong choice and needs help making the right one. Or needs help getting wrong behavior or bad attitude under control.
#2 We send said child to their room, to think about their actions, while they wait to be disciplined.
#3 After we have taken a moment to gather our thoughts and be sure we are not disciplining in anger, we enter their room, take them over our knee, and discipline them. Usually a swat will do. Not hard, just enough to sting a bit. Try it out on your own leg if you are unsure.
#4 We immediately take them in our arms and love on them, discussing why the spank was given. We talk about God’s Word and what He asks them to do, based on the offense.
#5 The child by this time is done with their sad tears, and apologizes to us and to the Lord, asking for forgiveness from both.
#6 The child leaves the room to go apologize to any children who observed the wrong behavior, or the child that was hurt by the wrong behavior.
It’s quite affective! Disciplining out of love, not anger is the key. AND, always always pointing them back to the Word of the Lord.
The best part is, by establishing this early on, our kids RARELY get spanks anymore. It’s awesome!
In fact all I have to do is open the drawer where “The Rod” lives, get it out and set it down near-by, and we go from this……………..
To this…………….
By doing our footwork early, and helping our kids understand that there are rules and they don’t change, we don’t have to use this form of discipline very often at all!
Our job as parents is to not only discourage wrong behavior, but to encourage right behavior. For this we use Sticker Charts…..
This is Destiny’s Cheerful Heart Chart. The verse on the bottom says: “Do everything without arguing or complaining, so you may become…children of God.” (Phil. 2:14)
She is filling hers for the 2nd time. When she filled the chart, she got to pick a reward. She choose to get a pedicure with her cousin, Julie.
Here is Tylan’s chart. He is half way done with his. His chart is an Obedience Chart. He says when he gets to the end of his chart, he is going to pick to go to Destiny’s school to eat lunch with her.
Here is Avery’s first chart. I just recently got around to making her one. With her, we are working on FIRST time obedience, so it seemed fitting that her chart would be about that.
Here is how it works: you obey first time with a cheerful heart, you get a sticker. If you obey, but with arguing and complaining, you do NOT get a sticker, but a verbal reminder from mom or dad to have a better attitude next time. If the wrong behavior or slow obedience continues, the child is asked to remove a sticker from their chart, which is quite dramatic! (but oh-so effective)
Tomorrow I will post about some of our other discipline options we choose to use, and tell you about the newest stage of discipline at our house. There are 7 years between our oldest and youngest, so that’s quite an age difference when it comes to methods of discipline and it’s effectiveness!
Proverbs 23:13: Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die.
~T
4 little Fergusons 