"Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells."
And that is no surprise. When toddlers control the home and parents resort to threatening, repeating and attempting to reason with an unreasonable mind - they will more than likely lose it.
And yelling at your child is a far worse offense than any form of Biblical discipline. Even our own poets figured that one out when they coined the attempted rebuttal:
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But names will never hurt me.
Which, of course, is an utter lie. Any guy who has been beat up at school will tell you that pummelling was easier to forget than what some girl called him one day. That is not any kind of endorsement of physical abuse, by the way. Just noting the fact that verbal abuse really does damage and a parent screaming at her kids is verbal abuse.
How much better to lovingly set clear boundaries with clear results for disobedience, then keep them. Of course, only Christian parents really get this becuase only Christian parents see their duty as shepherding a heart toward God, rather than creating trophies... or tragedies.
