I often think about the time my family visited a church and sat close to a child who was behaving quite badly. Because he was only a couple of rows ahead of us, we could hardly fail to notice that he was sitting neither still nor quiet. It seemed clear that he was old enough to be capable of doing so, but willful enough to choose not to. I saw his father growing more and more impatient until eventually he snapped and took action. He shoved his son into the aisle, then grabbed him by the ear and half-hauled, half-carried him out the back doors.
Parents are rarely at their best when they are being challenged by their children. They are rarely at their best when they are in church or other public settings and their kids act in embarrassing ways. Yet this never gives parents an excuse to mistreat their children or to handle them in inappropriate or undignified ways.
Matthew 18 does not speak specifically to the kind of discipline parents bring to their children, yet it does provide an important principle that extends to it: the importance of discipline with dignity. When Jesus explains how a church is to respond to a person who has committed sin and remained unrepentant, he describes a process that involves privacy and confidentiality. When one person has been sinned against by another, he is to approach that person privately. “Go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone,” says Jesus in verse 15. If he refuses to listen to you, “take one or two others along with you” (verse 16). It is only when a person remains obstinate after these two opportunities to repent that the matter is to be made public. “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church” (verse 17).
This God-given process carefully guards the dignity of the person who has sinned, or who has been falsely thought to have sinned. When carried out rightly, it ensures he is confronted in private before he is confronted in public. This protects his honor and reputation by giving him the opportunity to apologize when his sin is known by only a small number of people, or to explain why his behavior was not actually sinful, but perhaps a mere mistake, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. Jesus’s process wisely deals with sin while protecting the dignity of the sinner.
While these verses from Matthew 18 are not parenting instructions per se, the principle is wise enough that parents ought to consider how to integrate it into their parenting. Raising children will inevitably mean there are times when a parent needs to bring chastisement. “For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Hebrews 12:7) There is no good parenting without consistent discipline. Yet parents can carry out discipline in unwise ways that diminish the dignity of their children—that unnecessarily add embarrassment, shame, and dishonor.
Parents may deem it necessary to remove a child from a worship service, but it is never necessary to drag him out by his ear. Parents may deem it necessary to enforce some kind of corporal discipline, but it is never necessary to spank a child in front of her siblings or peers. It may be necessary to lay out consequences for misbehavior, but this can always be a private conversation rather than a family or public one. “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them,” says Jesus in Luke 6:31. And if you wish your own sin would be confronted privately and in a dignified way, who are you to deny this to your children?
If you wish your own sin would be confronted privately and in a dignified way, who are you to deny this to your children?
I’ll grant there are times when parents must act immediately and in ways that may bring shame to their children, but these should be exceptions rather than the rule, and should be done only when strictly necessary. If a child is behaving in such a way that he is endangering himself or another child, you may need to raise your voice to immediately get his attention and stop him in his tracks. If he has done something especially egregious, it may be that you need to take the kind of swift, public action you would otherwise avoid. But more commonly you can quietly remove the child from the situation and bring an appropriate measure of discipline where no one else can see or hear what transpires. You must always discipline your child in love, and to bring discipline in a loving way is to preserve and protect his dignity. This almost always necessitates disciplining him in private.
Parents are rarely at their best when they are being challenged by their children, yet they can be. They can grow in godly character to the degree that they become calm where they were once infuriated and become measured where they were once erratic. Parents ought to pray, then, that God will help them grow in wisdom and self-control so they can learn to be at their very best when their children are at their very worst. That is a prayer God is happy to hear and happy to answer.
