Ep. 154 || When You Don’t Know How to Discipline Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Emily: Hey guys, Emily here! And today I’m going to share a little bit about a topic that we’re asked about frequently in emails and dm’s. You might have heard Laura’s show on Sabbath last week—if you haven’t you should definitely check it out—and this show will be similar! But before I get to that I also want to just remind you that we have a list of resources for gospel-centered motherhood. Our team curates books, tools, media, and more to help you learn and grow. Head over to https://www.risenmotherhood.com/resources for more.
Okay, so today I want to talk with you about discipline.
But before I get started, I want to make a quick caveat. Today’s show is meant to deal with the questions that arise in the everyday challenges and stresses of parenting. If you are struggling with outbursts of anger or are using physical, emotional, or other types of violence or neglect as discipline strategies for your children, or you are in a marriage or home situation that presents danger to yourself or your children, please reach out to a trusted friend, counselor, or pastor for immediate help.
Not long ago, on a wintery evening, the kind where the sun sets before dinner is prepared, I found myself sitting on the couch with my shoulders slumped over, hands pressed against my temples, groaning in frustration. Let me share what the scene was like in our house, really quickly—in a simultaneous moment of chaos, the kind that might have been 30 seconds long or 5 minutes long—each one of my five children had some type of crisis, all at the same time. Two children had a physical altercation over a hushed and unkind comment that was made. At the same time, my toddler screamed and climbed onto the table to escape her playful brother. My son, not being able to grab her, grabbed a bowl of oatmeal off the table instead and smeared it over the floor with a gigantic smile. All the while, I was standing face to face with a child who needed to be dressed for a musical program, but he refused to change his clothes into the ones I requested, because he thought it would be a great idea to wear last-year’s suit—the one that was several inches too short on every limb.
Right about the time that all of this happened, my phone rings and it’s my husband calling. He’s on his way home, and he could hear the desperation in my voice as I say to him, “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do right now!”
Even though this was a more extreme situation, and luckily this isn’t a frequent occurrence in our house, it's a good example of what I sometimes feel when it comes to the topic of discipline and training our kids: I don’t know what to do.
On that particular evening, I wasn’t sure how to prioritize intervention, how much of the situation was my fault for being stressed or disorganized, how much was due to a weird schedule that night or tired, hungry children, how much was the result of childishness, what offenses needed to be handled first, how or when discipline and reconciliation needed to occur, and what specific strategies I should use. I felt like I knew I needed to do relational triage, but instead of thinking in a clear, systematic way, all my brain could do was spin until I plopped down on the couch.
Now, I honestly can’t remember the details of how every situation was resolved, but I know that everything was eventually. We went off to the music program and everybody had the right clothes on and everyone hugged and was reconciled. But I know there are still going to be more moments when I feel like I don’t know what to do.
This isn’t a new feeling for me. I can remember leaving the hospital with our first child. I remember driving home with a newborn in the backseat and marveling that they just let us leave! As brand new parents, we had very little knowledge of how to care for a child. I mean, we were aware of the basics—we knew we needed to change the diaper, feed the baby, make sure he slept, keep him safe—but everything felt like uncharted territory. I remember wishing that the doctors had sent us home with a handbook. Not just a general handbook (which I actually think they stuck in our go-home bag along a newborn swaddle and extra diapers) but a specific handbook—one that was made just for our child and just for our parenting questions. That would have come in handy that first night when I ended up sleeping on the floor next to the crib because he seemed to stir every few minutes, and his feeding was constant, and I was so, so sleepy.
But that was just babies. Lord willing, babies grow into toddlers, and as they get a little older they start spitting food at you and laughing, screaming, “No!” arching their back, melting down to the floor in a tantrum, or running the other way when you say, “Come here!” The need to train, and disciple, and discipline them in obedience and the ways of wisdom becomes apparent really quickly.
Then what? We don’t know.
Isn’t it interesting that such a common need in parenting is so unfamiliar to us? Why is that?
First of all, not many of us grew up with a detailed memory of the way our parents trained and disciplined us as children. If people do remember, even fewer are happy with their memories or want to repeat them with their own children. Some people even deal with trauma as adults because of violence, anger, and abuse they experienced. A small sect might have experienced loving but firm discipline, but living it as a child and practicing it as a parent feels like two different things.
Second, we see many nuances and complexities, and have questions about the unique situations with our children. Packaged “Christian” discipline advice might make sense to us on the surface, but what about when our child has a health problem that impacts their behavior, or they have special needs, cognitive impairments, developmental delays, mental health concerns, or are brought into the family through foster care or adoption? What about when they have a particularly strong-willed personality or a child acts crushed at the slightest hint that they did something wrong? We can struggle to apply the overarching principles to our unique lives.
Third, it can feel hard to get on the same page with our spouse. Maybe both parents are followers of Christ, maybe only one is. Maybe one feels strongly for a specific discipline strategy while the other is strongly opposed. Mom and dad bring different backgrounds, personalities, strengths, and sinful tendencies to the table, and all of that has to be worked through as two people train and discipline together with consistency.
Fourth, the topic is taboo—at least in our modern, Western culture. We’re not sure which friends even think it’s okay to tell a child “no” or set boundaries for them. Some psychologists, and health professionals tell cautionary tales—sometimes for good reason—and tell parents to tread very lightly because they might ruin their child for life. Even in church culture, we hesitate to share strategies with one another because we’re afraid of being judged and we’re not sure we’re on the right track anyway. I started doing a lot of research for this show and I went down into this deep rabbit hole on Google reading a multitude of conflicting studies and philosophies about discipline, and most of what I read left more questions than answers.
These four things probably don’t even begin to sum up the questions, “Why don’t we know how to discipline our children?” and “Why is it so hard?”—but it scratches the surface. At the end of the day, we are limited, created beings—made in the image of God but born of Adam—which means that we are impaired by sin. Our natural tendency to conform to the world and do whatever seems right in our own eyes and rely on our own answers and self-sufficiency, is our natural bent and default. We have to battle pitfalls on every side: complacency, unrighteous anger, power trips, and more.
It’s true, we really don’t know what to do. But maybe we can know where to turn.
When I was younger, I was fascinated (and also a little terrified of) The Wizard of Oz. I lived right on the border of Kansas, and I was well aware of the threat of tornadoes. I frequently dressed up as Dorothy for Halloween. I made a pretty convincing Dorothy with my dark brown hair pulled into braids. If you’ve never heard the story, I’m sorry if I’m spoiling it for you, but Dorthy’s house gets picked up by a tornado and she ends up somewhere over the rainbow in the land of Oz. And she has no idea what to do next or how she’s going to get home. But what she does learn early on is that she’s supposed to follow the yellow-brick road and turn to the Great Wizard of Oz. He’ll know what to do! So eventually through a lot of ups and downs in the story and many threats and friends and foes, she makes it to the Emerald City where she meets the Wizard of Oz. She doesn’t know what to do, but she knows where to turn.
There’s a better version of a story like this too that we’ve mentioned on the show a dozen or more times, but it’s a great allegory of the Christian life. The main character’s name is Christian and he has a great burden on his back. He wants to leave his hometown, the City of Destruction and make it safely to the Celestial City, but he’s not sure how. He doesn’t know what to do, but along the way he discovers that he has to follow this narrow path. In one powerful scene, he turns and runs to the cross as the burden falls off of his back and rolls down the hill into a tomb. Eventually, one step at a time, he stays on the King’s Highway (even through many setbacks) and he makes it to his destination.
The Bible has the best version of this story, and in it, this “I don’t know what to do but I know where to turn” theme runs strong. Throughout the story of the Bible we see people who don’t know the right thing to do—who are sinful, scared, powerless, lost, and stuck—hearing from God that they need to turn to him. They don’t have to have everything figured out, they don’t know how to make things happen, but they must follow the ultimate King’s Highway, the One True God with utter devotion. Because he promises to give them help, comfort, direction, and strength to be faithful. He shows his people—and us today—that his plan is for people to come to him through his Son, Jesus Christ, and then walk in his ways.
Isaiah 45:22 says this: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth; For I am God, and there is no other.” Psalm 55:22 says, “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you.”
2 Timothy 3:16 talks about the word of God and how it’s helpful to us saying that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” And that’s what we need.
So as we all feel like we’re losing our bearings in motherhood—when our kids are unkind, rebellious, and need biblical boundaries and we’re the ones responsible—we can turn to God and receive help. We first turn to him for salvation, giving him all the burden of our sin and inadequacy for all he’s given us to do. And then we look to him and his word where we’ll see the character and heart of Jesus and ask God to help us live that out in our own homes and our own lives.
So today, I’m not planning to give a systematic overview of the concept of discipline in the Bible or give you a handbook of specific strategies for various ages and stages of children—I would love that too, but that’s not the point of today’s show. But I do want to give you seven helpful things that you can do when you’re not sure how to discipline.
First, you can study and understand the biblical concept of discipline. You might not always realize it, but we all come to the table with lots of assumptions about the word “discipline” from our life experience and the culture around us. We each have biases and we’re prone to think that our general feeling about things is correct, when it might actually be the farthest thing from the truth. But the Bible is the ultimate and authoritative source of truth about who God is and what he asks of us. So we have to have a heart and posture that is willing to set aside the things we thought we knew and be ready and willing to submit to what God has to say on the topic.
If you’re not sure how to study the Bible this way, letting scripture interpret scripture, we’ll include some links in our show notes at risenmotherhood.com. And we also have free Bible study tools for inductive study on our website. But I wanted to give you a few tips right now. I found on Biblegateway.com they had a great article that had some guidelines for this that kind of summed up what I’ve done when I studied a topic.
The first thing you can do is use an online search tool or concordance to find all the places in the Bible where the word discipline is mentioned. I did a quick search and I found that it’s used 43 times in the ESV version. A more advanced step might also be to use a tool like blueletterbible.org to see if these words are all related or if they come from the same Hebrew or Greek words. You might also consider looking up similar words or verses that reference the responsibility of parents to train their children, or look for verses related to God’s character and his dealings with his own children. So yes, this might take several weeks of thinking, and praying, and learning, but you’ll learn so much!
Just a quick study that I was looking at brought up verse like Proverbs 3:11–12, “My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” Or, Proverbs 19:17, “Discipline your son, and he will give you rest; he will give delight to your heart.” Or, Ephesians 6:1 and 4, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right...Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
So again, that’s just a small sampling, but once you get all of these verses together, the next thing that you can do—and this is a place where a lot of people get off track—you need to examine each of the verses in context. Read it in it’s full passage. Because if not, you might inadvertently read the wrong meaning. Bible Gateway says it like this, “you can’t just read the verse on your screen, you have to read the verses around it, probably the whole chapter or more. Then you need to make some provisional conclusions about the meaning of the concept in that particular passage. You make some notes. You look up the passage in a commentary if you have time.”
Once you’ve studied all the verses individually, trying to understand what they meant to the original hearers in the context they’re given, you’re ready to compare all of those verses to one another and see what you’ve learned, synthesizing the concept. What did you learn about God? What did you learn about his design for discipline? Who does it? When, how, and why? How does sin impact it? There are so many questions you can ask, and I know that the Lord is going to lead you and help you understand it.
Studying a topic like this might feel like a huge investment of your time on the front end, but it’s so worth it, and it will make revisiting this topic less intimidating over the years of parenting. Because if we don’t understand the concept of discipline and how it fits into God’s character and relationship to his own children, we’ll just be unmotivated or we won’t be able to come to the point of application in our own parenting.
I was reminded of this concept recently because I’ve been watching my oldest child learn harder and harder math problems. Even though it seems like this long, arduous process for him to memorize all of these math facts, that foundational and automatic knowledge allows him to come to a double-digit problem, or later something like algebra, with the tools to solve it. Similarly, we need to learn “Bible basics about discipline” if we’re going to have any hope of applying that knowledge to a major meltdown in the grocery store!
So as you study—I’m letting you know right now—you will not find a step-by-step handbook, but you are going to learn critical truths that will serve as a foundation for the rest of the signposts I’m going to share in this episode.
So the second thing you can do when you don’t know what to do about discipline, is you can ask questions and seek help from older, wiser couples. Some of the best and most helpful things my husband and I have learned about applying the biblical truths of discipline have been from older couples. People who have raised their children—not perfectly, but faithfully—people who display love, and patience, and grace, people whose children are not perfect, but they’ve grown up to be healthy, well-adjusted, and thriving adults who love God and the church.
Proverbs 19:8 says, “The one who gets wisdom loves life; the one who cherishes understanding will soon prosper.” We get wisdom first and foremost from God in his word and through prayer and careful reading, but we also get it from others who help us apply it.
One time early on, I remember I had this wise older woman come to our house during naptime. I asked her to come over, I begged her to give me all of her tips. She gave me an in person little discipline 101 training lesson. She had notes and everything—it was so helpful! I was able to ask questions for clarification, and then I’ve gone back to her over the years for additional help.
One of the things that really stood out to me that she shared in that meeting was to make sure I’ve been proactive in training our children well and to spend a lot of energy there on the front end. And that tip, that training for me in the living room, led to my husband and I playing games like the “Come here!” game, where we’d have our toddlers practice running to us when we would call their name. Or the “Okay Mommy/Okay Daddy!” game, which we played in the evenings when everyone was relaxed and we’d train them and say, “When mommy says come, you stop whatever you’re doing and you come to me right now!” Then they would go hide and get further and further away in the house and then be rewarded with a big hug and cheers from the rest of the family when they obeyed right away. This training came in handy later when we were at a park or a public place and I needed them to come to me. They of course (like all kids) have had moments where they obstinately ignored me or said “No!” but knowing that they had the foundation of training gave me confidence in tough situations.
That’s just one of dozens of helpful examples and practical tips we’ve received from godly older couples. So, consider asking someone in your church if you can go out to dinner or coffee, and use precious babysitter time to hear from various couples about their experiences, successes, and even their failures.
I just want to put in a quick plug here because we have this in our family too. If you have a child with special needs or have a situation with foster care or adoption or something that seems out of the norm, also feel free to talk to a medical professional, or psychologist, or therapist, or somebody who’s a specialist in the field, about what you can do. We have worked through some of this with a child who can’t communicate with us verbally and has limited mobility. It’s been so helpful to consult with medical professionals and other parents who have different ideas about what to do.
Ok, so the third thing you can do when you don’t know how to discipline is read books and understand the various philosophies. When we were new parents, I remember reading several recommended books on the subject. I mean I had my highlighters, post-its, and pens—ready to find the perfect plans for the future. And while each book was helpful in some way, we didn’t find a clear-cut process to follow. I know, kind of a let down, but it’s true. This often makes it hard for me when people ask, “What book do you recommend on discipline? Give me the handbook so I can know what to do.” And I say, “I don’t know, I don’t have one clear-cut answer!” Each resource had principles and strategies that made sense and aligned with our understanding of God’s word, and each book that we read had some things that felt a little off-base for how we understood God’s word, or how we might apply it in our family. Also, some of the books I read were written decades ago, and maybe they didn’t take into consideration some of the things we’re facing today.
So even if you don’t whole-heartedly agree with every philosophy, read different biblical interpretations and applications about discipline by Christian authors along with their various arguments, cautions, and strategies because this can help when you’re getting into the nitty gritty of your own strategies. If anything, it might just help you decide what not to do, and why!
Also, this is a little bit different but along the same vein—it can be helpful to search for articles or online seminars with the same types of information. This is particularly true, again, when you’re looking for resources related to many of those nuances I talked about earlier, like special needs, foster care, or adoption.
Just like any non-fiction Christian book, it’s not the authoritative word of God. You have to be discerning, read with prayer, compare what you read to scripture, but take the meat and spit out the bones.
So the fourth thing you can do when you don’t know how to discipline, is work on getting on the same page with your spouse. I don’t want to spend a ton of time here because we actually have many podcast episodes on Risen Motherhood on this topic that we will link in our show notes, but it’s critical that as a mom, we don’t do all this research and learning in a silo, coming up with our own elaborate plan for training and discipline just to give our plan like a report to our husband later. Father’s have a critically important role and responsibility in the training and discipline of children. It’s not just mom or just dad, it’s both parents working together in unity.
And a couple quick notes on this, are just to pray. Pray together for your children, pray for your husband in this area, pray for unity as you learn about the topic of discipline and put things into practice together. Ask God to give you wisdom and grace-filled communication.
Another thing that’s helped me is to see and lean on the differences that God gave us in our different personalities and strengths.
Ok, the fifth thing you can do when you’re not sure how to discipline is work on developing a plan. I remember when there was a time when discipline felt like rocket-science. We hadn’t had a lot of experience or practice employing different strategies and with three toddlers at home, we needed consistency like, yesterday. It was time to put all the things we’d learned into some sort of coherent plan and to just try something!
At one point, I remember my husband and I took this long car ride—we must have been going somewhere for the weekend—and while we were on this car ride we talked through a lot of the common issues we faced with our kids, and we started to write down really specific strategies we wanted to use in those situations. We talked about how we could be more proactive and we made a plan to start doing those things. We talked about what we would do when rebellion persisted or our plan “A” wasn’t working. We talked about how we wanted to partner together and be united in front of our children.
So all of this led to this hand-drawn plan that I posted on our wall for a while. Don’t worry, our kids couldn’t read yet, they didn't know what it was. But in the midst of a tantrum or a child looking me in the eye and yelling, “No!” as loud as they could, my mind would just go blank. I couldn’t remember anything and my natural tendency was to just panic and do nothing. So having that reference sheet on the wall helped me stick to that plan. It wasn’t that complicated, but anything new takes reminders and practice.
Eventually I didn’t need that posted to the wall anymore, but it was really helpful for a while. Years later, even where we’re at now, when specific concerns crop up with our children or new issues emerge, we still have to take time to talk with one another and develop specific plans for how we’re going to handle it based on scripture, and wisdom from others, and the knowledge of the issues that might be going on in our children’s hearts. So, I imagine that my husband and I will still be developing plans together until our children leave home!
So, the sixth thing you can do when you don’t know how to discipline is to pray. This one may feel obvious, but it is so, so important. It’s critical! Pray for yourself, your husband, and each individual child. Pray immediately, right in the moment when a discipline issue arises. Pray in your head or pray out loud. It’s okay to ask God right there in that moment for help and wisdom.
Pray consistently. Pray each day for your children, that God would save them and sanctify them, and that he would give you and your husband and the community wisdom and help to train them up in his ways.
Pray after the fact. When an issue has come up, and even after it’s been reconciled, pray with your child or pray alone and thank God for his love and his grace. Ask him for his continued help to follow and live in right relationship with him and others.
Also, don’t forget to ask others to pray for you! My husband and I have regularly asked older couples and our parents and others in our church to pray for our ability to wisely and lovingly train and discipline our children. I thought 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18 summed it up well, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
So, the seventh thing, and the final tip I’m going to give here—the thing you can do when you don’t know how to discipline, is just do something. Take action and then make adjustments. After all the other points, again, this might feel obvious. But at some point, we have to walk by faith and try out what we’re learning and planning. We do this, of course, through prayer and the strength of the Spirit. Psalm 37:5 says we commit our way to the Lord and he acts. We don’t always know where the path is going to lead, but we hold the hand of our Father and we take one step at a time.
Take the long view of parenting, knowing that kids (like adults!) have off days, and off weeks, and they go through phases where certain sins or struggles might seem more pronounced. And along the way, as a parent, repent. As we walk through this, so many sins are brought to the surface. That could be a whole other show in and of itself—that training and disciplining our children is going to reveal our own hurts, frustrations, and idols. So to do this well, we’re going to have to consistently confess our sin and inability to God, and ask for his help to make us more like Christ. I know I’ve heard Nancy Demoss Wolgemuth often say something like, “Anything that makes me need God is a blessing.” And I’ll tell you what—disciplining our children definitely does just that! So as we take those actions, we need to be ready to repent and continue turning back to God.
I want to end here with a Bible verse and then just a little bit of encouragement. Philipians 2:3–8 says, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
I’ll tell you, in this journey of learning how to discipline our children, our flesh is naturally selfish and it wants it’s own way, and it finds it hard to understand and live according to God’s ways. But Christ humbled himself—he’s our salvation, he’s our example. None of us are going to do this perfectly, but we look to Jesus for security and instruction.
This is ultimately what we give our children. We give them Christ and we show them our dependence on him. We might not know what to do when it comes to discipline and raising our children, but we can know where to turn. Turn to the Lord in prayer, read his word, talk to his people, and walk in faith.
Thanks, guys.