Proverbs 13:24 Rods, whips and cattle prods
He who withholds his rod hates his son, But he who loves him disciplines him diligently.
Proverbs 13:24 NASB
Growing and maturing can be a risky business. Push someone too hard and they resent you. Don’t push him hard enough and they miss an opportunity to fulfill their potential. Prune a plant too much and it dies. Don’t prune it at all and it’s growth is undirected, unfruitful, and unwieldy.
This proverb isn’t about the benefits of discipline, but rather the motivation behind it. A parent has a unique and privileged role in the life of another human being. They may guide a child’s growth. Speak into his future. Affirm core identity. Pass on valuable stories and traditions. But the biggest challenge we face is a wild, uncontrollable heart in each child that lusts for freedom, expression, and independence. These things are good. My son is given life without choosing it — he is born into the ongoing narrative of an epic struggle between good and evil, heaven and hell, light and darkness, white and black. Whether or not my two year old understands this, it is his reality.
Was our nature always prone to self? Probably not. But sin changed our nature and our very DNA. Now we are born with “self” as the marquee attraction. A drama which plays daily at a theater, schoolyard, or workplace near you. And this is the challenge each parent faces. How do I infuse my child with the absolute energy and freedom needed to rock it in this life, while clipping those harmful, life-sucking shoots that threaten to sidetrack what he wants and needs in his life? Humility, empathy, and emotional intelligence must be constantly cultivated.
Raising kids is tough. It’s work. What a child wants is not often aligned with what he needs. No boundaries on what he eats, when he sleeps, how he contributes to the family, how he treats and respects others, and he will be a miserable child. But as a parent, experience has taught me a better way. Eating sugar all the time will make you sick.
If I love my child, I will teach him there is an accountability to something bigger than himself that will serve him all of his life. The first lesson is accountability to the parent. The parent teaches accountability to God. Then to His spiritual and natural laws. Then to others. And finally, to himself — which was where is started. Love looks like something real. And these things are real. Solomon says withholding these things is not only being selfish (as a parent) but it is actually “hate,” which is a pretty strong summary. Love is vitally interested in the welfare of another. Permissiveness is at best an bad parenting strategy and at worse a dereliction of duty.
Rods, whips, and cattle prods
Violence triggers trauma, and if the core strategy of parenting is wielding a big stick without the absolute connectedness to the child and his progress — it is an abhorrent practice. On the other hand, just because something causes pain or is unpleasant, doesn’t make it wrong. A swift swat to an unthinking toddler focused on something that needs immediate course correction is often much less severe than a stern and disapproving expression to a highly sensitive child. I will subjugate my toddler to a needle in the arm or unpleasant antiseptic in a cut if it advances his health. Pain is not the issue. Intent and trust are. Physical punishment by a parent absolutely devoted to the child’s health and well-being is more appropriate than the political correctness of an ineffective style of discipline.
If given a choice, any adult today looking back on his childhood would welcome physical punishment by a parent to whom he is firmly attached and who loves him and knows him — over the distant, unaffected, unattached platitudes delivered by a distracted parent when the child is least likely to hear them.
Love means being engaged in the life of another — no matter what that looks like.
References to growth and discipline
Discipline your son while there is hope, And do not desire his death.
Proverbs 19:18 NASB
Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him.
Proverbs 22:15 NASB
Do not hold back discipline from the child, Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.
Proverbs 23:13 NASB
Do not hold back discipline from the child, Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die. You shall strike him with the rod And rescue his soul from Sheol.
Proverbs 23:13-14 NASB
The rod and reproof give wisdom, But a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother. Correct your son, and he will give you comfort; He will also delight your soul.
Proverbs 29:15, 17 NASB
And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
Hebrews 12:5-11 NASB
You shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD. Your clothing did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. Thus you are to know in your heart that the LORD your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son.
Deuteronomy 8:2-5 NASB