I started reading parenting books when my oldest was just a baby.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t really know what I was doing. Maybe I wanted to hear from people who knew children better than I did. Maybe I just needed a way to feel like I was improving my chances for raising a healthy human being.
Today, I average about two parenting books a month.
But there is one kind of book you will not see on my shelves: Christian parenting books.
Maybe it’s unfair to group them all in the same class, because, admittedly, there are a few I’ve read (out of many) that are actually good and had some valuable takeaways that I felt comfortable using in my own parenting journey (Give them Grace, by Elyse M. Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson and Say Goodbye to Whining, Complaining and Bad Attitudes…in You and Your Kids, by Scott Turansky are two that come to mind), but the majority of the ones I’ve picked up have one major piece that always rubs right up against my spirit.
When I read the words of those authors, about how if parents spare the rod we will spoil our children, the Spirit in me comes out swinging.
It’s not so much the idea of this “spare the rod, spoil the child” that is so controversial to me. It’s the philosophy built around it.
All those authors point to that verse in Proverbs: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them” (Proverbs 13:24).
But then they don’t tell us the real meaning of discipline, just say that it’s hands or a belt or a real “rod.”
I signed on to this way of thinking for the first four years of my parenting journey, and then the Spirit gently whispered to my heart, This is not the way discipline has to be.
That whisper came at a breaking point with a 4-year-old who was strong-willed no matter how many times he met the “rod” they all told me he needed, and it made me think…
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