Never Violence

Parenting is an extreme emotional sport. It’s not for the faint of heart.

The highs are high…

and the lows can be low.

At times we feel the exhilaration of pure, unbridled joy, and at other times our patience is tested and we feel pushed to the very edge of our limits. It's amazing to love someone so much and also be so frustrated by them. We worry about them and truly want to teach them to be good, kind, functioning humans that make the world a better place. It can feel like a heavy task to teach them; they inevitably do things wrong and we feel the weight of our responsibility to teach them and refine them into being the potential-filled adult we see inside of them. 

Children misbehave, show disrespect, and push our buttons. They wear us down and wear us out. It can be tempting at times to physically punish our children when they don't obey us. It can seem like the only way to teach them the lesson we want them to learn, or it can seem like the natural, warranted outlet for the anger we feel. Neal A. Maxwell taught us that we still have our agency in those moments. 

"Of course our genes, circumstances, and environments matter very much, and they shape us significantly. Yet there remains an inner zone in which we are sovereign, unless we abdicate. In this zone lies the essence of our individuality and our personal accountability."(Maxwell, 1996)

 Anger is a hard emotion to temper. However, Maxwell taught us that we still have a zone of sovereignty where we get to decide how we react. We get to choose how we handle the situation. No one can take that power to choose away from us, nor can we blame how we handle it on anyone else. 

I recently read a story about discipline that touched my heart and gave me further clarity into why physical punishment is not the Lord's way:

When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor's wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn't believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking - - the first of his life. And she told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, 'Mama, I couldn't find a switch, but here's a rock that you can throw at me.' All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child's point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy onto her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because violence begins in the nursery - - one can raise children into violence." (Nilson, 1992)

It breaks my heart that the little boy in the story thought his mom was spanking him for the purpose of inflicting pain on him. It goes to show that our kids lack the life experience and perspective to understand physical punishment. They cannot make the connection when it is not there to be made. I believe that physically disciplining our children may achieve the short-term behavioral correction we seek. But I feel that the damage it does to their tender hearts will far outlast the lesson that was intended to be taught.

Works Cited

Maxwell, N. A. (1996, October). According to the Desire of our Hearts. Ensign.

Nilson, L. (1992, October). Pippi Power: An Interview with Astrid Lingren. Parenting, p. 132.