Connection – Page 4 – Disciplining With Gentle Firmness

We are so interconnected a higher plane than we can truly understand. After all, we don’t even use much of our God given brain power because it’d overload us. But in Heaven, we’ll finally understand so much more than we do now. Our perceptions will be gone from what the Church and society has taught us, and we’ll be childlike again.

That is why God gets so upset when people hurt children because they know so much spiritually, but we ruin it. That makes me sick. Children know God, but our doctrines and punishments plant sin in them. Then they believe whatever we teach because they are so trusting & humble. If we could/would just cultivate their knowledge of God and show them that He is their loving Daddy, this world would be better. But, satan knows this and wants to ruin it as quickly as possible to make children either reject God or believe that He’s this mean, angry God that so many Christians make Him out to be.

The best way we can preserve our connectiveness with our children and God is to discipline them. Teach them how to act through modeling. Help them learn to deal with their negative emotions by validating them and provide them appropriate ways of getting out their upsets. One way to do this is giving them a calm me jar.

To make a calm me jar, fill a plastic bottle with water. Then pour glitter in. Duct tape the cap on and give it to them when they are upset. They can manhandle it. As they calm down, they can watch the glitter settle. You can talk to them about their feelings.

Some other ways to stay connected to our children and God is to set realistic limits and use natural and consequences with our children I will be posting more on limits and consequences in the future. I go in depth about them and other positive discipline strategies in my book, Gentle Firmness.

We are so blessed to have a loving God Who values relationships over anything else!

“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

I love this quote so much. For many Christian and secular parents, turning away from punitive parenting and corporal punishment to gentle and firm parenting is a huge first step in faith. It means rejecting what most of the culture is teaching and doing. It also means getting ridiculed and told that your children will turn out as “brats.”

It means for us Christians rejecting a very prevalent church doctrine that is touted as “Biblical truth.” While the Church is ever so slowly coming to the realization that God never intended for children to be spanked/hit, many are actually afraid to come out of the closet due fear of being told that they and their children are going to Hell.

And though the gentle parenting movement is growing and there are a ton of resources on the Internet for how to truly discipline our children, it is often still a lonely journey as sometimes finding other local gentle parents is very difficult.

Often parents moving from punishment to discipline don’t know what TO do instead. They’ve only experienced painful corporal punishment. Taking a first step despite not being able to see where the staircase leads is a a huge leap of faith. It’s scary to go against the grain. Children are viewed as property and burdens in this society. We who are standing against this must have faith that we are making a difference even though we don’t always feel like we are.

Yes, we must have a lot of faith in this gentle parenting movement. I often get weary trying to teach and advocate for the respectful treatment of children. There are many days I want to give up. But then I’ll look into the eyes of an innocent child and think, “If I don’t speak up for them, who will?”

This verse also encourages me to keep going. “Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary” (Galatians 6:9). Yes, God and Martin Luther King, Jr. are right. Faith is taking that first step when we cannot see where we are going.