“Proponents of corporal punishment seem to have forgotten that the shepherd’s rod referred to in Scripture was used almost exclusively for guiding the sheep, especially the lambs, by simply holding the rod to block them from going in the wrong direction and then gently nudge them toward the right direction. If the rod was (or is) an instrument used principally for beating, I would have a difficult time with Psalm 23—‘Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me’.”

One of the most insightful books ever written about raising, loving, and disciplining children, is Dr. Ross Campbell’s ‘How to Really Love Your Child’. In that book Dr. Campbell writes:

“Discipline is training the child in the way he should go. Punishment is only one part of this and the less the better. Please remember this statement: the better disciplined a child is, the less punishment will be required. How well a child responds to discipline depends primarily on how much the child feels loved and accepted. So our biggest task is to make him feel loved and accepted.”

“I urge you to stop trying to live a lie before your kids. You don’t need to model perfection before them. In fact, you can’t, it just isn’t humanly possible. You need to communicate to your children that this is your goal even when you fail to achieve it. In those times when you fail, you need to seek God’s forgiveness, and your children’s forgiveness, confessing your human fallibility, receiving forgiveness, and seeking reconciliation. . . . .

“My father was a very gentle-natured, even tempered man, the pastor of a small church in Iowa. I remember one time when I was a little boy, Dad became very angry with my brother Paul and me over something we had done. In fact he probably over-reacted in this situation. He yelled at us, then stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him. I’d never seen him so angry before or since.

“We lived in a parsonage, right across the street from the church, and I remember looking out the window and watching him walk across the street and into the darkened, empty sanctuary of that church. He stayed there for about two hours. I don’t know what he was doing in there for two hours, but my hunch is that he was sitting in one of those pews, praying to God and struggling with his feelings of anger and with self-reproach over his own reaction toward us.

“I can remember my own feelings with crystal clarity. I was especially miserable in that I had been the cause of my father—my gentle, even-tempered father---losing his temper in a way I had never seen before. I went to bed that night before Dad came home, and I lay there in the dark, wide awake, for what seemed an awful long time.

“Then I remember my bedroom door swinging silently open, and the light from the hallway spilling into the darkness of my room, and my Dad stood silhouetted in the doorway for a moment. In that moment there must have been a struggle going on in his heart; I know that what he was doing couldn’t have been easy for him. But he did it. He came to my bedside and knelt there and said, ‘Son forgive me. I was wrong.’

“Our kids will remember and respect their memories of us if we are big enough, strong enough, mature enough to go to our knees in prayer, and go to them to ask forgiveness.”