Why Children Matter

by Douglas Wilson

Your purpose as parents is ultimately to be the instrument of your children’s salvation. You are not the ground of their salvation, but you are commanded to imitate the One who is the ground of their salvation.

We should correct children for their sakes, not for our own.

If you want to be a godly Christian parent without being a godly Christian who dies to yourself and your desires, then you have got everything all wrong from the beginning.

You and your children are putting off the old man. You and your children are putting on the new man. God is after a lineage, and He’s been after a lineage from the very beginning.

First, discipline is not punishment. Discipline has correction in view, while punishment has justice and retribution in view.

Why do we have penitentiaries? That is where you go to become penitent. The whole system of the penitentiary was built by the state to do the familial work of discipline, which the civil magistrate is not competent to do. The civil magistrate is assigned the sword (Rom. 13), not the spanking spoon.

Second, make sure that you discipline not with many rules but rather with a few principles.

Remember that God gave Adam and Eve a perfect garden: there was a world full of yes, and there was only one no. Minimize the number of no’s in your home.

Their world is going to be far more stable and secure if you reduce the number of requirements you place on them, but insist on obedience every time. It’s all a matter of percentages.

Third, keep calm.

Your emotional state might feel like disciplining when you should not, or it might feel like not disciplining when you should, so you cannot base discipline on the state of your emotions. In order to teach obedience, your disciplining must be itself obedient and disciplined.

If the moments of discipline just drive your children farther away, that should reveal something to you. Maybe they were never in the garden of fellowship in the first place, and maybe you need to do something about that. But if they are in fellowship with you, and your home is a happy home, then when sin disrupts it and you discipline them, they will want back in. That is a healthy sign.

You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize.

Fourth, discipline is love.

My family membership was never more secure than when I was sitting there, disciplined.

Teaching them, instructing them, walking alongside them, and making the world make sense to them all are ways of not provoking your children to wrath.

One writer has helpfully noted that education is about formation, not so much information.

we also need to remember that it is not wise to live in an echo chamber (2 Cor. 10:12). If nobody can approach you and question your decisions, you have an ungodly attitude. You should be fully convinced in your own mind at the end of the day because you need to make the decisions for your family, but you must be open to input from others.

You can tell whether you are instilling the right kind of discipline in your children by how you respond when someone suggests something to you. If you get your back up when anyone suggests something to you, you cannot be surprised when your child gets his back up when you suggest something to him. He is learning how to be teachable from you. Or not.

Godly parenting is a function of becoming more like Jesus in the presence of little ones who are also in the process of becoming more like Jesus.

The more like Jesus you are, the more like yourself you are going to be. The less like Jesus you are, the more monotonous and predictable it’s going to be.

When parents are confronted with a challenge, their first reaction should not be, “Let’s put a stop to this,” or “Sin has appeared in our child! We must whack it!” Rather, the first reaction should be to prayerfully ask if the Lord is revealing something to you about your own behavior and your pattern of life.