I Found This Interesting And Helpful For My Parenting

"My son bordered on being hyperactive. I was unprepared to deal with a child who seemed oblivious to our expectations and also unconcerned about his own safety. We used a lot of traditional discipline - methods that worked with our other children - to try to coerce our son's obedience. I sometimes found myself spanking him three, four, or more times a day in attempts to gain control of him, but to my dismay my efforts failed.

No amount of correction changed him. He misconduct threatened to demoralize the whole family. As a result, I found I sometimes I disciplined out of the fury I felt over my own failure. His behavior challenged my own sense of parental adequacy. Even worse, he began to think of himself as a "wild" child because I spoke about him that way. My concern for my own reputation was robbing my son of my love, his dignity, and God's grace.

Something had to change. One day I said to my wife, "I can't spank him anymore." This was as much an admission of my failure as it was a decision to try something else. Stubborn adherence to discipline measures that had worked with other children - measures that were part of my own background and demanded the least change in me - had, in fact, driven me from what I knew Christian parenting required. I was damaging my son to prove my parental competence.

We began to consider alternatives. Still, we knew abandoning discipline was not biblically permissible. God was gracious. First, he brought into my wife's choir a child development expert who told us that in their developing years, brilliant children (such as our son) are often hyperactive. Their actions result not from intentional discobedience but from their brains' demands from new sources of information and stimuli. Second, the Lord helped us recall that even in our child's most excitable moments, he would almost always settle when he mother took him into her lap, stroked his hair, and told him about how thrilled we were the day God brought him into ou world. If we could just capture the dynamics of that calming mechanism, we thought we might have a new discipline tool.

For the next several months whenever control was needed, instead of spanking we simply made our son sit down. He had to stop and be still until we said he could resume his activity. For this active child such time-outs were almost torture, but we insisted. The technique did not work like a charm, but over a period of weeks we began to see results. By allowing him to decompress, instead of overloading his system with the additional stimulation of a spanking, our son gained control.

In hindsight, I feel foolish when I consider the mistakes I made. Yet confession of these errors gives me a greater appreciation for Scripture's wisdom and God's grace. By insisting that my son respond to a single kind of discipline in the same manner as his siblings, I was not allowing him the dignity of being the individual God made him. The Lord has developed my son into a special person. I am very proud of the spiritual maturity in his life. Yet I recognize that I could have greatly damaged the understanding of God's grace in him if the Lord had not made my errors apparent."

-Bryan Chapell, Each For The Other, p. 179, 180