Sam Crabtree, Parenting with Loving Correction: Practical Help for Raising Young Children

Wheaton: Crossway, 2019, 117 pages.

Summary: An encouragingly biblical guide to correcting small children. It avoids the excess of thinking of the rod as only corporal discipline and the inanity of no or incoherent discipline.

Quotes:

“Corrective discipline means:

(1) Identifying actions or attitudes of your child that are unacceptable when weighed against clear explicit standards, then

(2) acting promptly and decisively to move your child in the direction of compliance with those standards.” (15)

“Like you and me, children are naturally prone to pursue their own happiness without regard to what pleases God or anybody else” (17)

“We need correction because we affirm wrong things, or we affirm good things over against better things, or we affirm good things from wrong motives. That’s our bent. (18)

“No baby in the nursery is crying because some other baby is wet or hungry. Infants come out of the womb entirely self-preoccupied and quite content to let the entire universe cater to them. Their self-will is fully formed. They are us.” (19)

“No child can be ‘disciplined’ into Christian faith. We’re all saved by grace, not discipline. But discipline can subdue defiance that prevents the child from sitting still long enough to hear the gospel.” (37)

“Three core imperatives for wise correction:

            1. Keep it God-centered.

            2. Speak truth—always mean what you say.

            3. Reward obedience, not disobedience.” (48)

“The parent who’s bent on practicing correction before first majoring on practicing affirmation is wise to take a hiatus from correction and first lay a groundwork of commending the commendable. Otherwise he’ll become a tyrant, and his corrections will become off-putting and ineffective.” (54)

“Children can train their parents. . . .Parents often unwittingly reinforce undesirable behaviors and weaken the behaviors they value.” (80-81)

“Tailor discipline to the child. Rewards for a specific child must actually be rewarding from that child’s perspective; likewise, assigned punishments must be aversive from each child’s perspective.” (91)

Benefits/Detriments: We live in a bizarre world where police officers patrol our elementary schools with tasers, nightsticks, and firearms, but parents are discouraged from correcting their children at home. (If you doubt police enforcement at schools google ‘elementary student tased.’)

Crabtree rightly suggests that parenting with loving correction may by God’s grace keep your child from being tased, but more likely from simply being horrible, and help prepare the soil to believe.