Discipline or Training?

I had a sort of “aha” moment this week.

Blake is always getting out of his bed at naptime. He is allowed to have books in his bed but he can’t get up and play. Over the last few months I would go in there and spank him sometimes 10 or 11 times before he would pass out, exhausted from crying. What’s worse is that everytime that I would spank him, I would get more and more angry that he didn’t obey me. I tried something new this week, since that apparently wasn’t working. When I heard him playing, I would calmly go in to his room, pick him up and put him in his bed and say night night, don’t get up. I’d smile and leave, stand by the door, and wait for him to get up again so that I could calmly put him in his bed. Each time he screamed and kicked and yelled. I just walked out pretending to be unphased, though I really wanted to throw the child out of the window. He finally went sleep and I felt much better.

So here’s my point. Maybe my problem is that I am replacing training with discipline. Training is teaching your child to do something, whereas discipline is judgement for not obeying. But obeying is difficult if there has been no training.

Maybe there are times when it’s ok not to spank. Before we had kids I just assumed that spanking was the only acceptable form of Christian discipline. So we spank for everything. And I mean everything. It isn’t unusual for Blake to get 8 spankings before 6:30 in the morning. But now I have started to reserve spankings for more terrible offenses like hitting, biting, or yelling at me in defiance.

It seems to me like this is a biblical idea. In Genesis, God set up rules and boundaries and then lovingly talked to Adam and Eve before telling them what their consequences would be. But their consequences weren’t the same. Yes, they both experienced seperation from God, but the woman got pain in childbirth and the man got hard work. Maybe it’s ok then to use different punishments based on the offense and the child. Or maybe I am reading into it too much?

This much I do know. I am much less stressed when I don’t have to spank. Is that bad?