I finished “Biblical Parenting” today. It is a book written by Crystal Lutton all about a parenting style called Grace-Based Discipline. It challenges the two most popular parenting styles out there: Parent-Centric (Authoritarian/Punitive) and Child-Centric (Child-Led/Permissive). Rather, it seeks to define a new style that is Christ-Centric. It asks the question: Why, when our daily “walk with God” is supposed to be modeled on how Jesus dealt with people, is our parenting style so radically opposed to how we were taught to treat ALL people.
It requires a difficult balance between these continuums:
- Teaching --- Correcting
- Servant --- Authority
- Blocking All Natural Consequences ---- Allowing All Natural Consequences
- Respecting --- Empowering
- Kind --- Firm
These are the 5 spectrums they discuss. At different points of your child’s life, you will need to be at each end of these.
For example: when your child is an infant, you need to be teaching, a servant, blocking all natural consequences, respecting and kind. As they grow up, you become less of a servant, more of an authority. Less respecting, more empowering. You will go from kind to firm, to kind to firm again (depending on the child’s stages). In each stage, you will have a role as a teacher, and later as a corrector as they grasp new concepts. And by the time they are ready to leave the house, you need to be swung way over to the “Allowing All Natural Consequences” side, because your time to protect them is over.
For the last week or so (as I’ve been reading it), I’ve been trying out some of the methods they suggest. I am often surprised at the effectiveness of this new model. I also like how less frustrated I am with both the outcome and the event while it’s happening. Long term results of course will have to be determined later on.
The only downside to the book was that I didn’t particularly care for her writing style, but as I was reading the book to learn something new, not to be entertained, that is a secondary concern.
I highly suggest this book to anyone with children, thinking about being parents, foster parents, adoptive parents or even babysitters and older siblings. If you have read the book, please let me know what your thoughts were on it, I’m very curious to talk to people who are actually using this method in their lives.
