Parenting

Reprinted with permission from Dan Miller’s book Spiritual Reflections. First posted at SharperIron Nov. 26, 2008.

My foibles as a father are numerous and varied. My intuitive responses to the rapid-fire ordeal of parental decision-making routinely unveil my native blockheadedness.

With this disclaimer firmly staked, I nonetheless testify to the remarkable benefit I gain from imitating my heavenly Father’s example as He nurtures His children. I am discovering that such imitation provides not only wisdom for parenting, but also becomes itself a means by which to better understand my Father.

For instance, by following God as parental exemplar, I am learning that skillful parenting occasionally commends the discipline of choosing our children’s pain over their pleasure. Living in an affluent, fun-at-any-cost culture, our default modus operandi as parents is to remove every pain as quickly as possible, or at least to reduce it as far as is feasible. But I find that God’s parental instincts flow much deeper and commend to us the capacity of permitting our children to suffer for their good (2 Cor. 1:3-9; 12:1-10; Heb. 12:4-13).

To illustrate, I once picked up my eight-year-old son from school over the lunch hour for a special father-son excursion to a local sporting goods store. I purchased a junior size basketball for him, and we dribbled and bounce-passed the new ball on the sidewalk in front of the store for several minutes (just to make sure it worked, of course) before I took him back to school. From that day forward, my son and that ball were virtually inseparable partners.

(Today and Thursday, we’ll be posting two perspectives on Christian parenting. Anne Sokol’s focuses on Tedd Tripp’s popular book on parenting. In tomorrow’s article, Aaron Blumer writes on “The Simplicity of Biblical Parenting.”)

For brevity, I focus here on my disagreements with Shepherding a Child’s Heart—its application of some Scriptures and its overall emphasis. My main concerns are these:

1. The book’s focus on requiring obedience as the primary component of the parent/child relationship and emphasis on parental authority as the right to require obedience.
2. Tripp’s teaching that spanking is the means the parent must use in order to bring a child back into “the circle of blessing.”
3. Tripp’s interpretation that the “rod” in Proverbs equals spanking, that spanking is even for young children, that spanking is the God-ordained means of discipline (which parents must obey) and that use of the rod saves a child’s soul from death.
4. His portrayal of any other style or method of parenting in a derogatory manner and training parents’ consciences that failure to discipline as his book teaches is disobedience to God.

These points are the heart of Tripp’s teaching, and while his book contains many truths, it does not communicate the full truth of gospel-oriented parenting, as he claims it does.