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Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
Is It Discipline or Abuse? The Spanking Debate with Doug Wilson
01:03:42
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- [00:00]
A
You said if you do not discipline your children effectively, you hate them.
- [00:04]
B
Yes. The Bible is very plain that refusal to discipline is a form of rejecting your child. It's a form of disowning them. And so the attitude of a father and a mother in disciplining the children should be I love you too much to let you go out into the world like that.
- [00:23]
A
You've taught that discipline is love and correction is part of sanctification. How do you respond to critics who say that that's abusive rather than loving?
- [00:31]
B
I would say I would rather listen to the Bible than to those critical.
- [00:58]
A
Is discipline an act of love or a form of harm? In an age that prizes emotional safety and therapeutic parenting, many Christian parents are asking a hard question. To spank or not to spank? And what does the Bible actually require when it comes to correcting our children? Today we're joined by Pastor Doug Wilson to tackle one of the most controversial conversations in Christian biblical discipline, the meaning of the rod, obedience, love, anger, and how correction is meant to point children to Christ rather than fear or humiliation. Doug Wilson is the longtime pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the founder of Canon Press, and the author of Keep youp How to Raise Strong Kids in an Age of Therapeutic Sentimentalism. For decades he's written and taught on Christian culture, family life, and what faithfulness looks like in a confused age. Pause and leave us a five star review letting us know which episode was your favorite from 2025. Watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or culture Apothecary on Spotify. Please welcome Pastor Doug Wilson to Culture Apothecary. In your book why Children Matter, you said if you do not discipline your children effectively, you hate them.
- [02:06]
B
Yes.
- [02:07]
A
What did you mean by that?
- [02:08]
B
Says in Proverbs that if you don't discipline your son, you hate your son. And of course, parents who don't discipline are not full of the emotion that we call hate. But it's tantamount to hate. It's equivalent to hate. There's a kind of hate hatred that is equivalent to the kindness that kills when you spoil a child, when you molly coddle a child, when you do everything for them, when you don't let them learn how to stand on their own two feet. You're not preparing them for life at all, and so you are hating them in effect. So hatred has to do with the actual objective consequences of your actions, not the emotion that you were feeling while you were pampering them. So pampering a child is a wonderful way to destroy A kid, and particularly boys, pampered boys are the worst.
- [03:03]
A
Why do you say particularly boys?
- [03:05]
B
Boys are aimed at where manhood is. So if you don't teach boys what men are for, they're not going to grow up into that. And men are called by God to provide and protect. Provide and protect. That's the charge that was given to Adam in the garden. To tend the garden and to keep the garden, to protect it. And in this fallen world, in order to protect, you have to be tough. The world is tough. The world is hard. The enemies that will threaten your family, they don't play fair, they don't mind cheating, they don't mind biting and gouging. And so a man who wants to love his family has to protect his family. And that means he has to stand in between the threat and his family. And in order to do that, you've got to be courageous and tough. Now if a man is called to be tough, boys have to learn how to be tough. You're not going to be pampered for 21 years and then all of a sudden someone flips a switch and you magically know how to be tough. No, it doesn't work that way. So a boy has to get into scrapes, he has to be fall off his bike and his dad has to pick him up and comfort him for a couple of seconds and then say, now suck it up. Right? You're not going to do that. You're not going to fall. You're not going to fall to pieces. No, not here. And people looking at that from the side say, oh, dad's being mean. No, dad is being really kind of to his future daughter in law.
- [04:39]
A
Wow, I like how you put that, you know. And you have a point about this because I remember reading Abigail Shrier's book Bad Therapy. She talks about how this new generation is so coddled and that she was talking to these teenage boys at a high school and there was a chipotle across the street and they were really hungry and they were thinking like, I don't know, after school dance or something like that, that they wanted to go get something to eat. She's like, well, there's a chipotle right there, why don't you just go? And they're like, oh, I don't know, like they were scared to cross the street. She also said that before this dance that boys were unsure how to put on a clip on tie. They didn't know how to tie a real tie. So then they were like, well, here's a clip on, but they were like, well, I don't know how to do this either. A clip on, right there is a problem. And you've got, you've got these teenagers that are not even getting their driver's licenses. They're opting to not even drive. I mean, what do you attribute that to?
- [05:28]
B
I would attribute it to mollycoddling kids, pampering them, doing everything, cutting their meat for them way past the point where they have to learn how to figure it out for themselves. A husband should be tough and tender both. Right. He should be a velvet covered brick. If a man is not tough for his wife, he is going to be tough on his wife. Right. That's an inescapable reality. A man is either going to be hard for his wife or hard on his wife. And in order to be that kind of guy, boys have to be taught how to be that kind of person by their fathers. And their mothers have to be there cheering dad on. How high should a boy climb the tree? Well, not as high as he wants and higher than mom wants.
- [06:19]
A
I like that you've taught that discipline is love and correction is part of sanctification. How do you respond to critics who say that that's abusive rather than loving?
- [06:28]
B
I would say, I would rather listen to the Bible than to those critics. The Bible says in Hebrews 12 that God disciplines every son that he receives. Don't be disheartened. When you are disciplined, God receives you as sons. And it says in Hebrews 12 that if you are not disciplined, then you're bastards. Refusal to discipline is a form of disowning. You're not giving your kids what they need to thrive and function in the world. Of course there are abusive situations. Of course there are parents who don't know how to discipline and they overdo it and they, they thrash their kid instead of disciplining their kid. You know, they, they don't know what godly discipline is. And so beating your kid up is not just is not discipline, but the Bible is very plain, plain. That refusal to discipline is a form of rejecting your child. It's a form of disowning them. And so the attitude of a father and a mother in disciplining the children should be, I love you too much to let you go out into the world like that.
- [07:35]
A
Yeah.
- [07:36]
B
So if you have a temper tantrum or if you are hungry and can't be civil to anybody in the household or you fall apart if, if anybody crosses you on the slightest thing that doesn't that, that's going to wreck you in your adult life. If that's not corrected, that, that's going to wreck you. And if, if the parents say, oh, we're going to let you go out like that, we're going to let you show up in the real world without any of those issues addressed. That is profound contempt for the child, profound love for the child. It means you treat them lawfully from the heart. What does God's word require of parents? Well, God's word requires discipline, care, feeding, instruction. And you do all this with the child's best interest in mind. So there's a difference between correcting your child from selfish motives and correcting your child because you love them too much to let them grow up to be that kind of person. So let's say you've got a roaring headache and the kids are banging around the living room and you snap at them, stop that right now. Well, you're, you're stopping them because you've got one nerve left and they're on it. Right? So it's a selfish reaction and you're teaching them the wrong thing. All right? But if they're careening around the living room and you say, you know, this is out, they're not exhibiting self control right now, and I love them too much to let them be that way in the world. You correct them because for their. You're giving them something. All right, so to take another example, if a father makes a son split and stack a quart of wood because now I don't have to do it. That's slave labor. You're, you're, you're being selfish. But a father could have his child split and stack a quarter wood because I want to give you a work ethic. Right. One father's taking, the other father's giving.
- [09:32]
A
Yeah.
- [09:33]
B
All right, so you're giving a work ethic, and that's what your motive should always be. How, how can I give to my children those things that God requires me to give to them?
- [09:44]
A
Some parents interpret the rod as literal spanking. Some say, you know, that's a metaphor, and to interpret it that way is super outdated and harmful. How do you define biblical discipline versus abuse?
- [09:57]
B
Okay, so biblical discipline using spanking spoon or. Yeah, as we did. I sometimes, we sometimes joked about Nancy having a holster made. So we had, we had three kids and we disciplined with a spanking spoon, with a, with the rod diligently. 90%, 95% of all the spankings occurred when they were five and under. And then during the grade school years. Course correction here and there and then, as I learned from my father, by the time they were 12 or 13. All done. Okay, what you're doing is internalizing the principle. So when they're little, you are establishing your authority. And you're doing it not because you need to be the big boss, but, but you're establishing your authority because they need someone to be the big boss. You're giving them a boss. You're not being a boss for your own ego needs. Little children who have a strong authority in their life are secure children. If kids don't know who's in charge and it varies from day to day, you're just establishing insecurity. So you're establishing your authority. And, and to people to say it's a metaphor, well, it says basically a rod for the back of fools in Book of Proverbs. And if someone says, yeah, but that's a, that's talking about delinquents and corporal punishment by the magistrate. Yeah, I grant that actually. But you, I would reason by analogy if that's appropriate for someone who's exhibiting big time sin, you know, destructive behavior. Wise parents can see the beginning of that same destructive behavior in a two year old. You don't need to be a botanist to tell that this little thing is Canadian thistle, even though it's just that size. Right. You don't have to wait till it's three feet tall before you deal with it. You can say, okay, I want to be a wise gardener. I want to uproot these, these tendencies, these, these sins, these character deficiencies, addressing them at the, at the time that they manifest themselves and using the rod of correction at. At the time.
- [12:26]
A
See, what I think a lot of women that are young moms would say in defense is they would say, well, it's insane to say that a two year old is exhibiting these deficiencies or sinful behaviors that they, that to go so far that they need to be spanked for it.
- [12:41]
B
Yeah. I say, well, does this two year old understand the connection between his behavior and the thing that he wants? Well, yeah, he's got that figured out. He's whining for the popsicle or he's whining for the toy. He, he understands the connection between whining and the thing he's angling for. So why can't he understand the connection between his whining and the disincentive? Right. I don't want this and I wanted that. And it turns out I don't want the swats more than I wanted the, the toy that my Brother was playing. Playing with. Okay, now again, this has to be done with without anger. In. In Galatians 6:1, it says, if a brother is overtaken in a fault, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself, lest you also be tempted. Okay? So if someone's overtaken in a fault, you're. If you're not spiritual, if you're annoyed or angry or upset, you're not qualified to discipline. The catch 22 is if you're qualified to discipline your kid for being rowdy and out of control, if you're qualified to discipline them, you don't feel like it because you're not annoyed.
- [13:53]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [13:55]
B
And as soon as. But as soon as you're annoyed, you're not qualified.
- [13:57]
A
So if, like, Mom's at home with kids and there's a moment that occurs that, you know, is definitely, like, fair to discipline, do you think if that mom is really frustrated in that moment, she should say, hey, you're going to be disciplined. We're going to wait till your dad gets home and kind of do it that way?
- [14:13]
B
Sometimes that's appropriate. I think it'd be better if she said, young man, go to the bedroom. I'll be there in a minute. And then she gets control of herself, you know, gets qualified, and then goes and disciplines him. Now, let's say, if it's some big deal, I think there are times it's appropriate to say, we're going to wait till dad gets home. But I think most of the time, mom should do it. If she's the one on the scene, mom should do it. If Dad's home, he's the one that should discipline. He should be the one backing mom up regularly when you do this. And this is quite striking, really. I pastor a church where this kind of thing is just accept it. This is a culture of people who understand and have been taught on what biblical discipline is. And I learned this from my father. That's how he disciplined me and my siblings. And we did this with our kids. And we've seen our kids doing it with our grandkids. We've seen this happen. My dad would take us aside for the discipline. There'd be an opportunity for the defense, which is usually pretty thin.
- [15:26]
A
Yeah, right.
- [15:27]
B
He would spank us and then hold us. And then what we did is we'd pray with the kids. We'd. We'd spank them. We'd say, we're going to get three swats because you popped off to your mom. You're disrespectful to your mother. And you're going to get three swats for that. Then hold them until they're done crying and then pray with them. And then say, as far as we're concerned, everything's clear. There's nothing between you and us. Everything's good and okay. Rejoin the family while I'm here, I should say. My dad laid down three basic rules for us. Life was simple in the household. The rules were no disobedience, no lying, and no disrespecting your mother. Those were, those were the rules to live by. And no disobedience, no lying, and no disrespecting your mom. And when, when I see a group of young people get to, you know, hanging out together and I've seen this before and the kids get onto spanking stories.
- [16:34]
A
Yeah.
- [16:36]
B
Times they got spanked.
- [16:37]
A
Right.
- [16:37]
B
It is a moment of high hilarity. This is not trauma. This is not traumatizing.
- [16:43]
A
Right.
- [16:44]
B
It's, it is something that the kids are secure. They know that their parents love them. They know that their parents did what they did for their best interest and they have every intention of doing the same thing.
- [16:54]
A
I've never thought about that, but you're so right. Like, when I've talked about that with my friends, like, okay, what was like one of the worst spankings you ever got? We are laughing, talking about it.
- [17:02]
B
That's right.
- [17:02]
A
So I've never really thought about that before. Talking about disciplining, spanking your child and then letting them cry and then praying with them and being like, okay, like there's nothing between us. Now I think that's just super hard for some reason for this young generation of parents to grasp. They feel like, how do you justify a child hitting their sibling and then saying, well, now I'm, don't hit him. And because you hit him, I'm going to hit you. Like, they can't wrap their mind around that. Have you heard that before?
- [17:24]
B
Yeah, I've heard that before. And I'd say, how can you justify a cop shooting a criminal when the criminal just shot the, the guy in the street? The criminal just stuck somebody up and robbed him and shot him. And then a police policeman chased him and then the policeman shot him. How inconsistent is that? I say not at all criminal versus, you know, the criminal shot a law abiding citizen. Right. And the cop shot, shot a criminal. This is, these things are different. Right. And the violence that little Tommy perpetrated was he clocked his sister over the head with a toy truck. Right. That's he was the criminal and mom or dad comes in and they, they discipline the child. It's the same exact. The parents are the policemen. The, the parents are the lawful established authority. And when you discipline someone for lawless violence, you're not teaching them lawless violence. You're, you're discouraging lawless violence. Just like the policeman is discouraged discouraging muggings.
- [18:30]
A
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- [20:48]
B
Well, I think conservatives are, have been far more influenced by the left, by the progressive zeitgeist than they realize. Okay, we have the whole conservative movement or the, let's say the reactionary red pilled movement has revolted against certain aspects of clown world. Right? Some things got so absurd that everybody just said, okay, that's it, deal me out, I'm done. Right? But there are some things where clown world has some absurdities embedded in it that, that we haven't identified yet and haven't gotten rid of yet. And the idea that gentle parenting is the way to go is one of those absurdities. Sin is bound up in the heart of a child. It says in Proverbs. Right? Sin is folly is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will remove it far from him. There is a Pelagian assumption about human nature. I'm sorry, Vivek just said it last night. Everybody's essentially good. No, they're not.
- [21:51]
A
No, they're not. You and I agree on that. No, they're not.
- [21:53]
B
No, they're not.
- [21:54]
A
Well, that's a big famous gentle parenting book is good inside, right? By Dr. Becky or whatever. That's her book.
- [21:59]
B
Yeah. So, but the Bible says, and my, this is again, my father, he, he said, he called babies little bundles of sin. The only thing that. And they're very cute, but they're little bundles of sin. The only thing they need to start sinning is the requisite intelligence and muscle strength. They veer that way. Parents have to give their kids violin lessons, they have to give them skating lessons, they have to give them piano lessons, driving lessons. But nobody has to give their kids sin lessons. Nobody has to teach their kids how to lie. You did something bad. You broke something.
- [22:41]
A
There's chocolate all over their mouth. Did you eat the cookies? No.
- [22:45]
B
Somebody has to teach them how to lie effectively. That's what, that's what college is for. But, but you don't have to give your kids sin lessons. We are, we veer toward sin. And the Bible says that folly is all bound up in the heart of a child. And it's loving parents that discipline appropriately that are God's instrument for removing that folly from them. The rod of discipline will, will remove it far from them. And I've, I've seen it happen. I've seen it in God's word, I've seen it done. I've seen it with our kids, all of whom are walking with the Lord. I've seen it with my grandkids, all of whom are walking with the Lord. They have grown up happy, joyful Christian people not because they were born naturally that way, but because they had parents who believed God's word. Over this pop psychology approach to coddling the criminal, the, the men, the mentality of just give them a timeout or I'm going to count to ten at this supermarket. You're not nine. Nine and a quarter. Nine and a half. Nine and three. Quarter. You're not teaching discipline. You're not teaching discipline, you're teaching fractions.
- [24:02]
A
What do you say to parents that say I'm with you Pastor Doug. But I just feel like if I were to get the wooden spoon out and swap my kid in Walmart while he's acting up, I'm going to get CPS called on me.
- [24:13]
B
Yeah. I would say don't be stupid.
- [24:15]
A
Yeah.
- [24:16]
B
Right. So we have, and this is my, my oldest daughter spent three years in England where things are even more stridently anti spanking. It's part of the regime of totalitolarance that we're living under. And so when discipline occasion arose and you know, in the car or something, my son in law would have to find a place to park that was away from all cameras. And you know, because. Not because he was going to abuse one of my grandchildren, but because we live in a hypersensitive age that will call things abuse that aren't correct. Yeah. And so what, what my wife used to do with, with our kids when she'd go to the grocery store is they would practice on the way, go over things on the way. We're going to go in there.
- [25:06]
A
Yeah. We're going to listen.
- [25:07]
B
You're going to listen. You're not going to ask me for anything. You're not going to ask me for anything. And if you're good, I might get you something. Right. I might get you a treat at the checkout. And if there was a scene or any kind of problem, then you'd wait till you get home. You wouldn't discipline your children publicly in a way that a bystander who's not a believer could not possibly understand. Right. So I would say don't be foolish.
- [25:40]
A
Christian parenting culture often says you shouldn't discipline a child in anger, which we talked about.
- [25:44]
B
Right.
- [25:45]
A
When a parent is in that moment, how can they discern between righteous correction and uncontrolled anger? Like, is there questions that a parent can ask themselves before they're ready to discipline?
- [25:56]
B
I don't want to say that anger is always universally out of place in a parent, but it would have to be pretty horrendous. I mean, you know, like, let's say a father found out that his teenage son was molesting a neighbor kid. Okay. That kind of thing would call for a righteous anger response. Right. I think it'd be wrong to just say, take. Take something like that in stride. It says in Ephesians, be angry and sin not so. Anger is not in itself a sin.
- [26:32]
A
It's what you do with it.
- [26:33]
B
It's what you do with it. And Paul says in Ephesians, don't let the sun go down on it. Because anger, even righteous anger, is like manna. It turns bad overnight. It becomes rancorous or bitterness or resentment. And the Bible actually talks about Jesus getting angry. But when Jesus got angry, for example, in the incident of the man with a withered hand in the synagogue, Jesus got angry. And the end result of that anger was a man had his hand healed. When we get angry, it says in James, that man's anger doesn't serve God's righteousness. We get angry. And that end result of that is the hole in the Sheetrock. That's uncontrolled anger. If it's righteous anger at some horrendous thing, it should still be controlled and focused and God honoring anger. But for 99% of the offenses that children commit, parents could should take it in stride. They should treat it like changing a diaper. Right. These things happen.
- [27:35]
A
Yeah, right.
- [27:36]
B
This is what we. If we're going to have a kid, we're going to have dirty diapers. If you have a kid, you're going to have a squabble. You're going to have sin, you're going to have selfishness, you're going to have grabbing, you're going to have tussling in the backseat. Don't make me come back there. Those, all of those are standard issue, off the rack, Kmart problems. And we should treat them that way we should just take them in stride. So I don't think parents should budget for being angry with their children, although there are, there are some unique circumstances where that could be called for.
- [28:09]
A
Your teachings have influenced a culture in which some parents tell their kids, you know, you have to show joy and obedience instantly, even to the point of spanking attendance. How do you respond to accusations that this teaches kids to suppress honest emotion?
- [28:26]
B
Yeah, this. Yes. Yeah, you can, you can feel that way, but you can't act that way.
- [28:33]
A
Right, Right. Yeah.
- [28:34]
B
So my dear wife had a, a video clip that went viral of couple years ago. We had, we did a mini conference in, in Moscow for some of the parents and there was a clip that, that Nancy was answering a question and she was addressing the fact that we did discipline for attitude. So you don't just discipline for breaking a vase or rebelling, you discipline for bad attitudes. And, and Nancy was talking about this and, and told a story of how she disciplined one of our, our daughters for a bad attitude when she came to pick her up at an event. So she disciplined for that and she instructed her to, the next time I pick you up at a friend's house, this is how you're going to respond. And people are going to say, and they did say, this is abuse. This is terrible. This is. You're teaching your kids to stuff it, you know, to pretend. You're teaching your kids to be hypocrites. No, you're teaching your kids to control their emotional life. You're teaching them. And so what she did was say, all right, this is where it went wrong. And the next time you're over, this is how, when I show up to pick you up, this is how you're going to respond. And that's exactly how she did respond the next time. And my daughter, the one, the one that's involved is, doesn't stuff anything. Right. But the emotions that she shows are righteous, godly, there's a lot of energy there, but no, no hypocrisy.
- [30:12]
A
Do you think in today's current culture we really celebrate, like any emotion you feel at any given time, it is your right. You must express it.
- [30:22]
B
That's right. And that's why we live in clown world. Let it all hang out is really bad advice. Why, why on earth do I, do I feel like I have the right to inflict the way I feel on the general public? Well, people feel that, right. They feel the liberty to go on television that way and, and, and do the Jerry Springer type of thing and, or meltdown on camera for their, for their TikTok video. Um, it's just you're not love. The Bible says you're to love your neighbor. Flipping out at the airport in front of other people is not loving your neighbor. Although actually that happened once. We are ticket counter, we were flying to, to England and it was the transatlantic flight and the lady in front of us just flipped out, had a meltdown, just came apart, just all the things you would think and then huffed off. And I stepped up next. I said to the lady, don't worry, we're nice. And she slapped us right in first class. So the lady was loving her neighbor, but not intentionally.
- [31:33]
A
Right.
- [31:35]
B
So basically it's the lack of discipline, the lack of emotional discipline, the lack of intellectual discipline, the lack of spiritual discipline, all of it goes together. It's just undisciplined. And you can't have an orderly first world society with everybody undisciplined like that.
- [31:54]
A
Do you think discipline and obedience are the primary goals of parenting? Or should nurturing attachment and emotional development take equal emphasis?
- [32:03]
B
Well, I would say I'd roll them all into a bundle together. The way I put this is I tell parents, your job is not to get your kids to conform to the standard. That's pretty easy. Your job is to get your kids to love the standard.
- [32:17]
A
Oh, how do you do that?
- [32:19]
B
Well, what you do is you begin by training. Here are the standards. You have to begin by showing them what the standards are. Okay. Don't lie, don't disobey, don't disrespect your mom. Those are the standards. Life is simple. These are the standards. And by consistently disciplining, that's another thing, is you consistently, you just must discipline consistently because you don't want your kids to think, okay, it's okay to disrespect mom, just not every third time, right? If you only react when you get annoyed, it's going to be erratic discipline. And it needs to be consistent discipline. If, if this is the standard, we consistently apply it and you're consistent, you're even handed, you don't lose your temper and, and, and you make sure that everything is good between you and your kid. When the discipline's over, we're back in fellowship, right? And, and everybody knows that in this family we prioritize being in fellowship with one another. It is right at the top, right? So we're in fellowship with one another. And when you do that, kids grow up loving the standard. Kids like being in fellowship with their parents. They like being in. It's much more pleasant to be in fellowship with your siblings. Squabbles are. Are natural in a. To a fallen people, but it's much more pleasant to play happily. And, and what you're doing is making it easier for them to play happily. You're making it easier for them to get along with everybody.
- [33:57]
A
How should parents balance obedience now with fostering a child's internal faith and voluntary love for Christ later?
- [34:05]
B
Yeah, my dad taught us he'd have sayings that he'd hand down. One of them was delayed obedience is disobedience. Okay? Delayed obedience is disobedience. If I tell you to do something, you need to do it now, and you need to drop what you're doing and go do it. And when you have prompt obedience like that, and your parents consistently correct you when it's not right. And if there's mercy or grace, there's a grace period in there, which I would also encourage, but not dragging it out over a day and a half. If, let's say, a kid comes in, running in from the backyard whining about what someone said to them or what their sibling did, and they come running into the house whining, mom stops, okay, I want you to run outside and come back in without that wine and tell me what happened. And I want you to use your big girl voice. I want you to use your big boy voice when you tell me what happened, but not that. And that's disciplining for attitudes. Right? And being that way is just more comfortable for everybody. And so you have a dinner table conversation where everybody's getting along, everybody's laughing together, everybody's telling stories, and they're in fellowship.
- [35:31]
A
How are you getting a sinful child to want to obey? Because it's not even mom and dad's rules. It's. It's God's rules. And having them having their love of Christ override.
- [35:46]
B
Right.
- [35:47]
A
The want to sin what.
- [35:48]
B
What my folks did and, and what we sought to do and. And the way to answer that question is the Christianity in the home. The. The centrality of the Bible in the home is a huge deal, but it's not the. You. It's not the centerpiece of discipline. It's the centerpiece of the home. So we would sit down for dinner every night. Every night the family eats together is a big. That's a big deal. And we would have either Bible reading or catechism or a Bible story or some sort of story. At dinner, between dinner and dessert, we have some sort of thing where we talk about The Lord. And that sort of, and that kind of God centeredness in the home is the orientation and the discipline that occurs is oriented to that. Okay. It's not like you tie the, the Bible verses onto the discipline. It's that you tie the discipline onto the Bible verses and, and the hot food onto the Bible verses and the fact that we worship the Lord on the Lord's day. Everything revolves around God's word. And there's something I wanted to make sure that I mentioned, and I think this ties into your question here, is that a lot of parents make the mistake of when, when the kids are little, sin can be relatively cute. There's no blood, no foul. It's. It's a kind of a funny story. There's no real damage. It's kind of embarrassing at the restaurant or it's kind of embarrassing at the grocery store, but, you know, and so it's big enough for parents to ignore, right? And, and paper over. And so the kids are little and there's relatively little damage done. And so the parents indulge, indulge, indulge, indulge. Well, then what happens is the kids get older and bigger and then all of a sudden it happens pretty quick. You find yourself the parent of a teenager who can get pregnant or can get somebody pregnant or can buy drugs or can drive recklessly and kill somebody. You're dealing with people who are now taller than you are as a mom and can seriously wreck their own life or somebody else's life. They can do real damage. Sin is now hazardous in ways that everybody can see. Right. It wasn't hazardous at the same level when it was small enough. You can bend a sapling, but you can't bend an oak, a grown oak. So what parents do is they indulge sin when it comes to when it's small enough to deal with and where you could instill the principles and you could actually get. Get make real headway. And then when the kids get old enough to do real damage, the parents panic and then they start laying on rules, right? Yeah, you're grounded. You can't do that. And all of a sudden, this kid who's had no rules or had his own way run of the place for 15 years, all of a sudden rules are being put on because mom and dad are panicked now and he's got a girlfriend and they don't want to be early grandparents. And think about this. Boys, particularly boys are children of the appetite. So they're hungry or competitive or, you know, and they're sort of subject to their passions. And you have a real opportunity when they're three and four years old to teach them how to be self controlled with regard to their passions. Right. And it's, it's can be significant, but it's manageable. You can, you can do it. But then if you let it go 10 years later, all of a sudden the kid's body fills up with testosterone.
- [39:37]
A
Yeah.
- [39:37]
B
And there are girls everywhere. And the most driving passion he's ever experienced in his life is suddenly on his mind all the time. And he doesn't have the first bit of a clue on how to control passion.
- [39:52]
A
Man, this is so true for teenagers today, I think.
- [39:54]
B
And then. So you're grounded, you're restricted. No, no, no, no, no. Well, all you're doing now is provoking rebellion.
- [40:02]
A
Yep.
- [40:02]
B
Okay. And so you're like jabbing the kid with a short stick. And, and you say, okay, how come? What do we do then? And I'd say, well, establish your authority in the first five years. I'll just be frank. Our kids first five years grew up in a familial North Korea. They lived in a totalitarian state. We had views on everything they did and we were strict and we held them to the line and we loved them, but we were strict and we established that as they grew older, we took restrictions off instead of putting them on. Like our oldest daughter when she was 16, I said we were just example of they were in a Christian school, in a Christian community, and they'd go to a friend's birthday party and they're going to watch a movie at the party. And we'd say, okay, what movie? We cared about what movie. And these are all Christians and Christian families and people are going to be wonderful Christian people when they grow up. And we cared about the movie. And maybe you have to sit that one out or maybe you have to leave the party. Earlier we, we were strict, right. And. But when Becca was 16, I said, okay, Becca, you can watch any movie you want. If the kids want to go to a movie, you don't have to check with us. Just go. We took the, took the restriction off.
- [41:33]
A
So why did you do that?
- [41:34]
B
Because the standard was internalized. Right.
- [41:37]
A
You trusted her.
- [41:38]
B
We trusted her. She had come. She loved, she understood the standard and she loved it. She agreed with it. She, she, we had buy in on the standard from her. And so we took the standard off and let's say the kids at school were saying, oh, we're gonna go see Stupid Movie 3, or I wish I could go see Stupid Movie 3. But my parents would kill me if I, you know, if I, if I did that. And Becca could say I could go if I wanted. What? What? Your parents are the strict ones. What, what do you mean you could go? Well, my folks told me I could go watch whatever I wanted. That makes no sense. Well, I don't want to. I don't want to. Right, because think, think about it this way. Jump over to a boy who's 16 if you start layering rules on when he's 14 and more when he's 15, more when he's 16, when he's 18 and he joins the Navy and he's off in the Philippines. What kind of authority do you think your house rules are going to be in Manila? Basically, if he doesn't love your standards by that point, he doesn't love your standards. And so what you want to do is take the restrictions off as you're approaching that launch date, when your kids are about to go to college or about to join the military, they're getting to that point, you should have some idea of how it's going to go.
- [43:04]
A
I love the way you've described this. I think this makes so much sense for my own teenage rebellion, is that, yeah, I do feel like the rules were piled on more and more. And I hated that. I was like, what are you talking about? Like, let me go somewhere on my own. I know what to do. And it was very frustrating for me. And I think if this would have been the way things were done, I think I would have respected it a lot more and, yeah, been more likely to be like, I could do that, but I think it's not right to do so. I'm not going to. It's just, I don't even know the psychology of it just would work well with me. Because the thing is, with my personality, as soon as you tell me I'm not allowed to do something now I'm like, I'm angry and I want to do it just because I was told no. But if I'm given a choice, I will. More often than not, I'm going to make the right decision.
- [43:47]
B
You put up a hidden camera and a sign that says wet paint. Don't touch. Just record how many people touch. And it says that in Romans that basically, Romans 3:20 and Romans 5:20. The law provokes disobedience. Okay? The thing that's going to transform Christian kids is gospel, not law. It's not rules. Rules are an after effect. They are byproduct. They're not the Thing itself. So the thing that should the family, the household should revolve around is love, gospel, grace. You should have a home. Like when God put us in the garden of Eden. It was a paradise. And there was one no. In the middle of the garden there was a tree. That's a no. Everything else was a yes. The whole world was a yes. And so strict biblical parents should have their. They should seek to have their whole home be a yes. And certain basic fundamental no's. No. No disobedience, no lying, no disrespecting your mother. That's it. Everything else is fair game. This is your house. Everything else is fair game. And as opposed to many strict parents, have a garden of no. And then one begrudging yes.
- [45:09]
A
Yeah. Yeah, right.
- [45:10]
B
Okay, I'll give you a treat. If at the end of the day, if you live perfectly in this gloom of ours, in this rainy, drizzly gloom, that's not how it ought to be. Kids ought to delight to be in their home and they should delight to be with their parents. They should want to be with their parents. A healthy sign for parents of teenagers is when mom and dad want a chance to visit after the day and they go into their bedroom or something to visit a little bit after dinner. And then one by one their teenagers trickle in and sit on the bed and sit on the floor and sit because they want to be with mom and dad. That's. That's the kind of thing that you're.
- [45:52]
A
Aiming for 100 and you know who does such a great job of talking about that is Sally Clarkson. I love listening to her talk about how to create this loving, peaceful home where ideas, ideally, the older your kids get, even as teenagers with their own driver's license and whatever, of course they're gonna go to and from at some point, but at the end of the day, they want to be together as a family. They enjoy having dinner with the family. You know, in some homes, it's like the teenagers cannot wait. They get their license. They're like, I'm never home. Like, I can't wait to be with my friends or be with my friends, families and their parents because of whatever they've cultivated. It's more fun and enjoyable to be around than in my own home. And so I love that idea of, you know, creating this life giving home where people, your spouse and your children want to actively be till obviously you're old enough to move out. And then you're having your own home and then you're recreating that for your own family.
- [46:41]
B
That's right. And today my kids all live in Moscow and we have a family gathering every Saturday night. We have a Sabbath dinner where everybody congregates together. They have their own homes, their own families, their own meals.
- [46:55]
A
Charlie would have loved that.
- [46:55]
B
And then every Saturday night I've got 18 grandkids and five great grands and the families congregate. And then when we have company, it could be upwards of 50, 60 people. Whoa. And this is a weekly feast, a weekly sit down inauguration of the Lord's day. And everybody wants to come, everybody wants to be there, everybody wants to see the cousins. So the cousins have functionally grown up. They're functional brothers and sisters because they've been around each other. It's just as, as earthly blessings go, it's right at the top.
- [47:37]
A
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- [50:01]
B
Absolutely, because they are different. So there's a, there's a distinction that has to be made between discipline and punishment. Okay. Punishment is simply retributive when, when someone has murdered someone and they are sentenced to die, the governor, and the governor refuses to sign a pardon. The death sentence is not calculated to make that criminal better. It might, you know, he might get right with God. He might ask to visit the prison chaplain, he might get right with God. But the point of it is not to get him right with God. The point is to remove a threat from society. The point is simple retributive justice. That is punishment. Punishment shouldn't be functioning that way in the, in the home. In the home, it's discipline, not punishment. Discipline is corrective. Discipline is the question, should boys and girls be disciplined? The same is like asking, should boys and girls have to spend the same amount of time in the bathtub? Well, how dirty are they?
- [51:12]
A
Yeah, it just depends, right?
- [51:13]
B
It depends. So if you've got a little tank of a boy and he is rebellious and stiff necked and tough and everything, and his sister is delicate and refined and mom or dad looks at her, hey, that was not good. And she dissolves into tears because that's all the correction she needs. And it's not crocodile tears. It's. She's really sensitive and she accepts the correction and puts it right for dad to spank her the same amount he has to spank her.
- [51:51]
A
Strong willed brother.
- [51:52]
B
Strong willed brother. That'd be injustice. You don't have to. You're. You're correcting and you correct to the point where the correction takes.
- [52:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [52:01]
B
And so when I remember vividly as a small boy when I was going to be spanked, I took it as a personal challenge to see how far I could go without crying. I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to submit to this. Well, I'd submit to it, but I'm not going to go along with it. I'm not going to approve of this and I'm going to be as tough as I can be. Well, that is a very different challenge for a parent than a girl who accepts their correction right away.
- [52:36]
A
Sure.
- [52:36]
B
Or. And not because not to be a boy who accepts the correction right away or a girl who's being stiff necked. So basically you have to adjust according to the personality, gifts and sex of the child.
- [52:50]
A
Some Christians describe your discipline techniques and teachings as authoritarian or legalistic. Do you think that that's a fair critique?
- [52:58]
B
Well, no, no, I don't. Legalistic would be if we're making up standards of our own that are not biblical. Okay. God's laws are not legalistic. So love your brother, love your sister, don't tell lies, honor your mother. Those are all biblical standards. So it's not legalism and it's not authoritarian. It's authoritative. Okay.
- [53:28]
A
Yep. And there is a difference.
- [53:29]
B
There is a difference. Authoritarian is where someone's being a martinet or someone's being a bossy pants and they're, they're on a power trip. You're little and I'm big and I can make you do things because you're little and I'm big. That's authoritarian. But if you give the gift of authority to your children, remember your, your kids need authority in their life the same way they need food, the same way they need drink and sleep and shelter. They need authority. And so if you look at the difference between boys who grow up in a fatherless home, how many of them go to the penitentiary, and boys who grow up in a home with a strong father. The strong father is an authority in their life and that authority is a gift to them. The lack of authority is what makes the authoritarian measure have to come in later in the judge and the cop and the so Jesus is our authority, but Jesus is the kind of authority who bleeds. Jesus says at the last supper he's you're, I'm your Lord. And you're right, I am. And he got down and washed the disciples feet. So he's the authority who sacrifices. So a father should be a true Authority in the home, not an authoritarian. An authority in the home is the kind who. I define masculinity as the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility.
- [55:01]
A
I like that.
- [55:02]
B
Okay, so if the father and the husband gladly assumes the role of sacrificing on behalf of his people, I'm going to lay my life down. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for it. So that's the provide and protect measure again. So a husband should intervene, protect his family, protect his wife, and do so to the, to the extent that he would lay down his life for them.
- [55:31]
A
How do you feel about Christian parents exposing their kids to secular art and culture for entertainment?
- [55:36]
B
I would. I'm with you right up to the last two words.
- [55:39]
A
Okay.
- [55:39]
B
Okay. I believe I've been instrumental in establishing and pursuing classical Christian education. Our kids all got a classical Christian education both in K12 and in New St. Andrews College. So they've been exposed to secular learning. The best that the secular world has to offer. You know, so we're not creating straw man. We, you know, we've. They've read, they've read Plato, they've read Herodotus, they've read pagan writers. Now, I don't think that it should. It's right for Christian kids to go take in secular, let's say a secular movie for entertainment where you turn your brain off, you turn your Christian worldview off and just sort of take in whatever they're feeding you. Because storytelling is catechetical. It's catechesis. They are teaching you how to think about the world and you need to have the kids interact with it. When my kids were junior high, high school age, this was back in the Stone Age when MTV was first coming in. It was just the 80s, 80s. It was back when MTV actually played music videos. I don't know what they're doing now, but, but they, they played music videos then and it was just the new thing. And I would, I would sit down with my kids, turn on mtv and we'd watch a music video and then I'd turn it off and I'd say, okay, what were they saying? What, what was that? Where's that band coming from? What was that? What was the worldview represented? Was that hedonism? Was that nihilism? Was that, what were they saying and was it true? Okay. And of course we wouldn't watch anything. It was really skanky. But it was a worldview exercise. So I wanted my kids to see what, how, what, and how the world promulgated their Message.
- [57:43]
A
Right.
- [57:44]
B
So. Because otherwise you leave your kids defenseless.
- [57:47]
A
Totally.
- [57:47]
B
Right. So you have to teach them how to interact with it. But it's kind of like if your dad's a magician and he does all these tricks for you, and now you know how the trick is done and you go to a magician's performance, you're not going to be nearly as impressed because you know how that trick is done. Kids who are established in worldview analysis and they. They're watching a news program. I remember one time, one of my. One of my kids, we were watching the news and the newscaster or somebody said something and one of my kids said, name the fallacy. That's the fallacy of, you know, pinpointed. They're able to process and interact with. So I don't think it should be a runaway. Runaway. You know that there's a secular movie. Runaway.
- [58:36]
A
Yeah.
- [58:37]
B
But I also don't believe that kids should be allowed to watch secular entertainment unthinkingly.
- [58:45]
A
That makes sense. Yeah. Because you're. You're saying you would watch it with them and then discuss it as a.
- [58:49]
B
Family and things, or if they wanted to go to, let's say, Becca, who was allowed to go to whatever movie. Sure, you can go. But the. What we wanted to do is tomorrow night at dinner, we're going to talk about that movie.
- [59:00]
A
Yeah.
- [59:00]
B
We're gonna. We're gonna download what you thought of it, what. How do you interacted with it, what were they saying?
- [59:05]
A
If there was one principle that you could imprint on every Christian parent's heart about disciplining their children, what would it be? And why does it matter? For the next generation of believers, it.
- [59:15]
B
Would be make the word of God central to your own life and to the life of your household. That would be the basic principle. Don't listen to what the world says. What does the Bible say? What do these verses say? Folly's bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will remove it. Far from it. It says that and sorry, I'm not going to apologize for it. So that there's. There's that. And. And realize that if you don't make the word of God central, then being inspired by Charlie to get married and have kids is no great victory.
- [59:50]
A
Wow.
- [59:50]
B
If you have five kids who all fall away from the faith.
- [59:54]
A
Yep.
- [59:55]
B
Who. Who wants evangelical parents to marry so that they can become breeders for the other team?
- [60:00]
A
Yeah, I.
- [60:02]
B
You don't want. The prophet Samuel, unfortunately had two sons who took bribes. For example, they didn't follow in their father's footsteps. Samuel wouldn't have been more blessed if he had five sons who took bribes, as opposed to two. Quantity by itself is not the goal. You want to marry, have children and bring them up, as Paul says in Ephesians 6, bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
- [60:28]
A
Thank you for saying that. So many people are just sharing that quote of Charlie's and they're not giving that very important context, which he absolutely would have agreed with, by the way. Of course, if you could offer one remedy to heal a sick culture, I ask every guest this one remedy to heal a sick culture. It could be physically, emotionally, or spiritually. What would it be?
- [60:47]
B
Recognizing the lordship of Jesus Christ over everything, including our public, civil, civic, cultural affairs. So basically recognizing that secularism is a failed project. We cannot govern ourselves without reference to the transcendent. We cannot govern ourselves without reference to God.
- [61:08]
A
Tell us about your latest book.
- [61:09]
B
So my next book that'll be coming out is called Malthusian Antichrist and Malthusianism is the Error of zero sum thinking, where the all our resources are thought of as a pie, and a bigger piece for you means a smaller piece for me. That's zero sum thinking. And that's how collectivist. That's how socialists think. That's how feminists think. That's how all the isms think. Virtually all the isms. Beware of all isms, except for prisms and. And nationalism. That's okay.
- [61:42]
A
Yeah.
- [61:43]
B
Basically, you don't want an ideology that says the world has got a fixed number of resources and if someone else is blessed more greatly, then that's a loss for me. That's envy talking. Okay, so Malthusian Antichrist identifies zero sum thinking as the center of all of our cultural problems. Because in God's economy, the pie grows. God has given us a world that is abundant, abundantly fertile, and the pie grows. And would I rather have 50% of a small pie or 0.005% of an enormous pie?
- [62:22]
A
Yeah, right.
- [62:24]
B
Well, the pie grows.
- [62:25]
A
I am so happy to have you on. I love Canon Press.
- [62:29]
B
Thank you.
- [62:30]
A
And I had Tilly Dillahay on over the summer to talk about her book.
- [62:35]
B
That's a great book.
- [62:35]
A
And when I tell you that episode was so viral, the women in my audience were obsessed with that episode. And so I was so excited to get to talk to you about this other very controversial topic because we talked about, you know, submitting to your husband and what that ideally looks like biblically and all of that. And so I'M really excited for this episode. You know, it's something a lot of even Christian moms don't want to come on and talk about because they are scared that somebody then is gonna, you know, call on their family and. And take their kids.
- [63:06]
B
I can talk about it because I'm a grandpa.
- [63:08]
A
Exactly. So you were the perfect person to do this. And so I thank you so much for coming on Culture Apothecary.
- [63:13]
B
Thank you.
- [63:17]
A
If you want to get Doug's book on everything that we just talked about, it's called keep your kids. You can get that@canon press.com use code ALEX, and you will get 20% off. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern, anywhere you get your podcasts. We are trying to heal a sick culture physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.