What The Bible Says About Disciplining A Child & Why You Should Do So
One girl was so boisterous and noisy in church and the father tried to stop her, but she retorted ‘leave me’. She was between 3-4 years.
Hear me! You don’t learn to control your children outside; you do that from home. When your children can not obey you outside, how much less they would, at home. It shows you already lost control of them at home.
If you have to discipline or flog them to make them obey you, you must do that at home. The Bible says: Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him. (Prov. 22:25 – NASB).
Also in Proverbs 13:24, the Bible says: Whoever spares the rod, hates their children, but the one who loves their children, is careful to discipline them.
When I was a child, if you did something wrong and my mother said “I will tell your father”, you would be restless because my father would really discipline you. My mother cared for, and disciplined us, but we dreaded my father on another level because he had a special cane for our discipline in those days.
As a father, if you leave the discipline of a child to only your wife, then something is not right. Today, when one parent is disciplining a child for an attrocity committed, the other parent is busy shouting ‘leave him/her, he/she is only a child’. That’s an erroneous behaviour that would only serve to reinforce the bad character in the child.
When a child notices that you always take sides with him/her, whenever he or she is to be punished, they will start running to you, whenever that would happen, or when it happens in your absence, they would make statements like “I will tell my mummy for you 😏” or “I will tell my daddy”, but they don’t know that you have started building a bad character in them already.
As a father, your children should dread your punishment more than that of their mother. Instead of scolding your wife whenever she’s punishing a misbehaving child, rather side with her, to make the child see that he or she has really done bad and the punishment is for their good and out of your love for them.