Discipline—The Art of

Dear TEAMS,

Both your father and I grew up in a house that used spanking to control our behavior.  (Notice that I did not say spanking as discipline.)  As far as controlling our behavior, it worked well for our parents, because both your father and I didn’t want to get spankings any more than we had to.

This is just another family curse that your daddy and I stopped in your ancestral line.  By all accounts, the woman that raised my father (your Grandpa K)’s mother was literally insane.  My Grandma S endured some pretty serious stuff, and therefore I’m certain my father also endured some serious stuff.   Therefore, he had no training on how to discipline a child, but knew it probably shouldn’t be as bad as what he endured.  I wish to honor my father in that fact…that I truly believe he wanted to go easier on me than what he had.

Your father has a very funny story of his mother chasing him around with a flyswatter, and how he knew it was serious when the Tupperware cake keeper handle was used.  Again, not discipline.

I can only speak from my experience, but spankings in my house were, “If I piss my parents off enough, I will have a sore butt.  And if I do something REALLY wrong, my pants will be pulled down and I will have an even sorer butt.”  This is not discipline.  This is abuse, because at the heart of the spanking was that I did something wrong and my parents were annoyed and were trying to get the thing that was annoying them to stop.  As the recipient of this behavior, I learned to walk in a low level fear and learn to gauge how much I could get away with based on my parent’s moods.  It became a sort of weird game.

Notice that I mention in the previous scenario that I did something wrong.  This is important, because this letter to you is about discipline.  The choice you will have with your own children, my grandchildren, is whether or not you will simply control their behavior or use the opportunity of their failure to obey to help them learn a life skill.  It is a decision you will have to make over and over and over again, because your children will test you over and over again for a variety of reasons and because you will not be the same person every day of your life.  But the truth of discipline never changes:  activity that is meted out simply to get another party to behave a certain way for the convenience of another is selfish at best and abuse at its worst.  True discipline involves a training process by which activity is applied to another along with understanding and knowledge about the activity for the purposes of changing a heart from a harmful state.

There have been failures with both your father and I in our discipline, where we simply punished your behavior.  I regret that, and hope that you will forgive/have forgiven us.  I made it a point to ask your forgiveness afterwards each time.  However, the majority of times I disciplined you, especially as young children, I used the method I talk about in the next posts.  It seemed to work very well and allow you the opportunity to feel respected and loved, even though “paddies” were being used. 

 

And you are all such marvelous people, I believe it was indeed training.

Love,