Disciplining Your Darlings

Whether you're cuddling with your newborn or running around chasing your toddler, you've likely thought a lot about how you will raise your children. If you're looking for literature to help guide you in this endeavor, I've got a few recommendations (see below). But the one that I'm focusing on today is Don't Make Me Count to Three by Ginger Plowman. Her book couples wit and wisdom to assist you in your heart motivation and actions as your child's primary disciplinarian.

To save you some suspense, she doesn't condone the "count to three" method. Instead she uses and, I think, brilliantly applies Scripture to train her children. After all, Plowman reminds us, "God uses His Word in order to convict His children. Therefore when our children sin, we should use God's Word in order that they might be convicted." Do you beat your kids over the head with the Bible? Absolutely not. Rather, she encourages you to study Scripture so that you will be equipped in the "heat of the moment" to apply the appropriate Biblical response. The goal is that your child will gradually learn how to respond on his/her own, thereby living out the apostle Paul's prayer for the church in Phillipi, "That your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ." (Phil. 1:9-10)

Recommendations:

*"Don't Make Me Count to Three!" by Ginger Plowman

*Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp

*The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems by Tracy Hogg and Melinda Blau

*The New Dare to Discipline by Dr. James Dobson

*Parenting by the Book by John Rosemond