Shepherding a Child's Heart

When Is My Child Old Enough?
When your child is old enough to resist your directives, he is old
enough to be disciplined. When he is resisting you, he is disobeying.
If you fail to respond, those rebellious responses become entrenched.
The longer you put off disciplining, the more intractable the
disobedience will become.
Rebellion can be something as simple as a small child struggling
against a diaper change or stiffening his body when you want him to
sit on your lap. The discipline procedure is the same as that which is
laid out above. You have no way of knowing how much a child less
than a year old can understand, but we do know that understanding

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comes long before the ability to articulate.
Your temptation will be to wait until your children are speaking
and able to articulate their rebellion before you deal with it. When our
oldest child was approximately 8 months old, we were confronted
with parenting our first mobile child. He crawled everywhere. We had
a bookshelf constructed of boards and bricks. Fearing the shelf would
fall on him, Margy told him not to pull himself up by the shelf. After
moving him away from the shelf, she left the room. As she peeked in
on him, she observed him surveying the room. Not seeing her, he
headed back toward the forbidden bookshelf. Here was a young child,
not yet able to walk or to talk, looking to see if the coast was clear so
he could disobey. Obviously, he was old enough to be disciplined.
When is a Child Too Old?
I always tell parents that I do not know the answer to this
question; there are so many variables to take into account. There are
maturational differences between children. There is the place of a
child within the constellation of other children in your home. There
are differences in disposition and temperament. All of this makes it
both impossible and unwise to create an arbitrary date after which one
would never spank.
What I find is this. Spanking is most effective in dealing with
young children. They fear being spanked. The spanking gives weight
to your words. The spanking sobers and humbles the child. As
children get older they get more stoic about spanking. They learn how
to deal with it. The intensity of spanking required to make the same
impression on a 12-year-old that you make on a 2-year-old would be
excessive.
As children mature, there are other consequences to be employed.
In a later chapter we will examine means and methods to employ
when dealing with older children and teens.