Good parenting is a child's first experience of being presented with the gospel. Embraced in a loving, warmly affectionate atmosphere of Mom and Dad's wise parenting, the child also experiences consequences for rebelling against firm boundaries within the home. He is disciplined and then reconciled with the parent for good, wholesome, ongoing relating. This is the way that God designed for the family to live in harmony. The home functions as a great colossus of moral development. Such parenting prepares children for encountering God's absolutes in their lives as adults. The world’s absolutes (budgets, for example) don't yield to cuteness, coyness and belligerence. Temper tantrums don't offset the consequences of adultery.
That's the gospel. God loves us. When we sin, we encounter very painful consequences. Christ bears the punishment for us, eager to restore the relationship. Likewise, in a godly home later when God deals directly with a young child's soul, the child remembers from his own experience that every deviant action was met with fallout. Somewhere in the back of his psyche he remembers that consequences were always paid. Bad behavior doesn't go unnoticed in the universe. But here now is something strangely wonderful: someone ELSE pays it for him.
Sadly, "firm" is not firm in many homes. Most modern children have never heard "no" as really "no." That word has been received as a suggestion for the child to feel free to ignore.
Many children never experience an immovable boundary. They eat what they want to eat, they sleep when they want to sleep, they watch what they want to watch. When the child reaches big, immovable boundaries in adulthood he crashes. As he feels himself descending into chaos, he starts plotting avenues of escape; he takes on compulsions and addictions that kick the can down the road of reality, to explode later. Now in the big wide world he loses love from others who won't put up with it, or he loses personal advancement via circumstances that won't yield to his willfulness. Without discipline, he didn't experience real love in the home, and now doesn't experience it at all in the world.
Follow your own word around the house. If you say "no", mean it. Then, discipline the child. Soon afterwards, reconcile; gather the child onto your lap and hug him. Explain to him what just happened. As a parent, mean your "no" the FIRST time you say it and you won't descend into anger. Catch it at the "letting out of waters," at the first sign of it, and you'll administer some consequence with calmness and in wisdom. You'll save yourself the grief of your own rage, and the child the grief of having a double-minded parent and a shaky view of his own identity before God. You do God and the child a favor to dispense this sure understanding of the real gospel. Tend your sheep carefully.
For much more on this topic, read our book, Beyond Discipline: Train your child’s character.
