Shepherding a Child's Heart

Bribery approach: “Do your work all week and I’ll take you to the
ball game.”
Emotional approach: “Please do your work. I get so upset when
you don’t. It makes me feel like crying. I wonder where I went

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wrong.” Or, “I have invested an awful lot in your education and you
are making me feel that I have wasted my money.”
Punitive approach: “You didn’t do your work, so no TV for a
week. If you fail again tomorrow it will be no TV for two
weeksweeks…. ”
Behavior modification approach: “For every day you do your
work, I’ll put a slip of paper in the jar with your name on it … ”
I-didn’t-turn-out-so-bad approach: “If I didn’t do my work,
Grandpa used to smack me around. It didn’t hurt me; I learned to do
my work … (smack).” Or perhaps, “When I didn’t do my work, he
left me alone and sooner or later I learned my lesson. It’s your
problem, not mine.”
What has each of these approaches accomplished? It is hoped that
each has resulted in getting the kid to do his work. The question is
this: How can you move from any of these approaches to the precious,
life-giving truth that God sent his Son to set people free from sin?
The above approaches don’t lead to the message of the gospel. The
heart is being trained away from Christ and his cross.
Character development is ignored. The emphasis is on getting
homework done. Children are not being trained to make ethical
choices as responsible people living in reverence for God. They are
learning how to jump through your hoops and avoid your displeasure.
They learn to make choices based on expediency rather than principle.
There is another devastating effect of this approach to discipline.
It produces distance between parent and child. Children soon see
through the implicit and explicit manipulation. They eventually come
to resent the crass attempts to control their behavior. They learn to
play the cat-and-mouse game with you, but depth of relationship and
communication is lost. As they get older and can begin to imagine
living independently of Mom and Dad, they become more resistant to
the manipulation and perhaps even openly rebellious.
Even the apparent success stories in unbiblical parenting are

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deceiving. Perhaps you have seen your upbringing in these
illustrations. You may be one of those who says, “I didn’t turn out so
bad.” Perhaps you never openly rebelled against your folks. Maybe
you are like a friend of mine. She went to college. She got her degree.
She was married and has children. From a distance she doesn’t seem
that messed up, but she knows the internal struggles with self-doubt.
She knows what it is to live with the fear of man. She craves approval.
She was never taught to understand her behavior in terms of attitudes
of heart. She has trouble getting from the problems in her life to
Christ. The Christian life doesn’t make sense to her. While she has
never seen a counselor or appeared to others as being a basket case,
she has been devastated by unbiblical parenting and the idolatrous
interaction of her heart with those unbiblical approaches.
Remember, God is not only concerned with the “what” of
parenting, he is concerned with the “how.” The Bible speaks to the
issues of methodology. What direction does the Bible give us for
dealing with these issues? The next chapter addresses these questions.