Shepherding a Child's Heart

Emotionalism
Another method is emotionalism. This is what the mother in the

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opening illustration was using. She appealed to the child’s fear of
being left alone in a strange airport. The appeal was to her daughter’s
sense of emotional well-being. She knew her daughter could not deal
with the emotional threat of being left alone in the airport.
Some use this same emotional approach in a “kinder” way. I have
heard parents say, “It really makes me feel bad when you talk like
that. You are hurting my feelings .…” Here, again, the point of
reference is emotional well-being.
Another variety of emotional appeal is to shame a child. A young
girl in my acquaintance is routinely shamed with threats about her
actions spoiling her father’s reputation as a community leader. The
appeal is not to obey for the glory of God. Rather, it is an emotion-
laden shaming for putting her father’s credibility at risk by her
unacceptable behavior.
A family in my acquaintance has systematically used another
form of emotional privation. They reject a spanking as cruel. They
place their misbehaving daughter in a chair alone in the middle of the
living room for a specified period of time. As long as the child is
being punished in the chair, no one in the family may speak to her or
have any contact with her. She is isolated from the family, which
carries on as if she were not even there. Asked what makes her sadder
than anything, this 7-year-old girl replied, “I am saddest when I am
on the chair, and my Daddy is home, but he won’t talk to me.”
This approach is not only cruel, but ineffective in addressing the
heart biblically. This young girl is not learning to understand her
behavior biblically. She is not learning to discern the specific issues
of the heart that her behavior reflects. What she is learning is to avoid
the emotional privation of being on the chair. Her heart is being
trained, but not to know and love God. She is being trained to respond
to the crippling fear of emotional privation.
While she is likely to become hardened to this method of
discipline, we may expect it to have a long-term effect. She may be

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driven by a life-long desire to please her parents and secure their
approbation. Or she may internally distance herself from her parents
in order to be insulated from further hurt. Whether she is compliant or
rebellious, she is not learning to live out of a desire to know and serve
God.