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“Whoever spares the rod hates his son”

Proverbs 13:24

To quote this verse simply as justification for corporal punishment of children is to miss the point entirely. There are scores of children the world over who have never been spanked, but are well adjusted and raised by parents who love them dearly. Also, quoting this verse as justification for disciplining children when discipline just means punishment for an act of wrong doing, is also oversimplifying the text.

The crux of this verse is an understanding that raising well adjusted kids requires diligently and conscientiously making them sometimes uncomfortable. The rod represents discomfort. Disciplining children is good and absolutely necessary. However, when all discipline entails is punishment for doing something wrong, it can send an unintended message: “bad things happen when you do something wrong!” That may have a good moral ring to it, but it is not always true, at least not always immediately. It can also have a negative impact on some children, where they become overly cautious in making mistakes and completely avoid taking risks for fear of evoking bad consequences.

Disciplining children should be about creating uncomfortable situations and training them to cope and successfully navigate unfavourable situations to achieve positive outcomes. You want your children to always make positive choices but especially when they have made a mistake.

Many parents fall into the trap of wanting their children to live a totally unperturbed, unchallenged, comfortable life. Perhaps because of how they perceive their own upbringing, they want to shield their children from every form of hardship and pain. However, this does not serve the children well because life is uncontrollable and inevitably, children will face difficulty in the real world as they grow. Therefore, the untrained child becomes over-burdened, unable to cope and unskilled in making positive choices when the going gets tough.

Believe it or not, hardship is not all bad when correctly channeled, it can help to develop good character – endurance, grit, long-suffering, patience.

“We are full of joy even when we suffer. We know that our suffering gives us the strength to go on. The strength to go on produces character. Character produces hope. And hope will never bring us shame.

Romans 5:3-5

Aaron Mckie absolutely captures the essence of this message, when recounting an interaction with the late John Chaney – both men were former basketball head coaches at Temple University, USA:

“My Grandfather walked 10 miles to work every day,
My father walked 5 miles,
I am driving a Cadillac,
My son is in a Mercedes,
My grandson will be in a Ferrari,
He said, my great-grandson will be walking again!”
“So I asked him, well why is that?
And he said to me,
Tough times create strong men,
Strong men create easy times,
Easy times create weak men,
Weak men create tough times!

Aaron McKie delivering a message from late John Chaney

Even nature attests to consciously creating uncomfortable situations for our children, whereby they can be trained under the watchful eye of parents. Most young birds leave the nest before they can fly. They are not taught to fly, rather they are simply pushed out of the nest and expected to work it out on their own, letting instinct take over. In most cases, their parents are feeding them and watching close by.

Does this sound uncomfortable? Absolutely! But permit your kids to sometimes feel uncomfortable, let them try to work things out on their own before stepping in, let them make mistakes, let them fail, let them cry, let them practise getting back up when they fall instead of trying to prevent every fall.

Of course, whenever possible, we all want to give our children as good an upbringing as we had, if not better, but just because you don’t want them to go through the same tests, don’t let them miss the lessons too!