I’ve heard the Pearls mentioned as the “gold standard” for child training. I disagree with the Pearl’s on so many levels, I don’t know where to start. I haven’t researched their child training methods, but the examples I’ve heard given here and other sites leads me to believe I would likely disagree with them on this topic as well.

Leslie Viles, I’m still befuddled by the whole On Becoming Babywise contraversy. Like you, I did research the method – but only AFTER I had used it successfully, and was saddened by what was reported. I had a hard time finding any actual documentation other than folks who had decided they didn’t like anything other than demand feeding. I suspect there is a lot of agenda driven dislike of this method, but I’ll tell you, I hate the idea that a family would suffer because they felt enslaved to any method, Babywise or another that will remain nameless. Useless.

Breaking a child’s will is breaking something God gave them. What we want to do is teach them how to use their will rightly, and in order to do that, we need to see their will as a GIFT from God, not as an enemy.

One of the biggest concerns I have is the idea that a parent and child are adversaries. This is not a Biblical view of parenting at all.

This young mother means well, but she is viewing her child as her adversary, as a soul to conquer instead of a lamb from God to journey alongside.

We are playing right into the hands of the enemy when we view parenting as an adversarial relationship instead of a temporary opportunity to shepherd a soul that God highly esteems.

Please, from an older mom to a younger one (and from a mom who does believe that helping our children learn obedience is important), never ever set out to break something that God designed. Our wills are precious things and they are not to be broken. Breaking wills is what totalatarian regimes do, not what believers do.

This is abuse.

Please, Kelly, as an older mom, speak up.

This is abuse.

My dear sister with the 16 month old, consider how God trains His babies. How does He train His little ones? At what age does God demand first-time obedience from us? (Does God ever demand first-time obedience? Isn’t He the God of new beginnings, of second chances?)

Does God forget our age, forget our stage of brain development? No, He is the God who DESIGNED our brains to develop as they do.

We can expect a lot out of our kids without making the mistake of expecting them to think like adults. They won’t. They can’t. We have to be the adults and find ways to guide them like God guides us—hand in hand, in warmth, in kindness.

A 16 month old should not be locked in a highchair and spanked repeatedly. You may have won a small battle, but something very destructive happened inside of your child that day, making the small battle far from worth it.

Please go to the Scriptures and look at how God handles His children’s sin? Look at Isaiah and Jeremiah. God appealed to His children over and over and over again, tried a variety of different ways to get their attention, before He used painful chastisement.

Ladies, let us use God’s example and let us, like God, “be mindful of our children’s frame, that they are but dust.”

Mercy to the little ones. They are God’s lambs. Shall we teach them to obey? YES. Of course, because we love them. But let us teach them like God teaches us—which is usually full of smiles and hugs and warmth, not switching them until perfection is reached.

I agree with you. We do need to be Bereans. I haven’t read the Pearls’ book, but I have read babywise and when doing research on that method, I found that much damage had been caused by their method from people who may have been naive, or I don’t know. In some cases brain damage. Also, I think we need to look at our motives for training the children. I agree they need training, but we need to make sure that our motive isn’t our own convenience, but what is best for the child. Sometimes I think we can push them through a phase before they are ready and then problems will arise later from that.

Thanks so much for sharing your story!

I just wanted to respond to Mrs. W. We have a few friends who adopted from foster care, and because the kids were previously abused, spanking wasn’t a good tool for these Christian parents. We had looked into foster care adoption, and because of knowing of these friend’s experience, I began to look into alternatives to spanking (I’m not anti-spanking, btw, but I think it’s good to have a rich set of tools in our discipline tool box, including alternatives to spanking when appropriate). Anyways, that led me into a lot of thinking about what Christian discipline means, and some friends encouraged me to look at the relationship between discipline and discipleship. There are a lot of Biblical principles that extend beyond the four or five “spanking” verses in Proverbs that we can use in discipling our children. For example, there are Proverns urging children to “flee temptation.” I think about that when I redirect my toddlers, and they have learned to walk away from things that they aren’t supposed to touch (even without spanking). But it took me coming alongside them and walking them through walking away many times before it became a pattern for them.

Also, I hope this isn’t inappropriate here, but there have been some real concerns with some of the extremes of Pearl-based discipline (for lack of a better word), just as a caution, even though some have found much good in their writings as well. Some of the formulations of their discipline (perhaps some ideas that they expressed differently than they meant)–even if unintentional on their parts–have led to some appalling abuse on parts of naive parents. I wanted to know what the controversy was when older Christian women were gently warning others to use caution in reading the Pearls, so I went to their site. One example he uses on his website–in which he pulls his belt off, whips a child (not his own child), without warning he was going to spank her (I think that’s a red light sign, he didn’t tell her what his intentions were), and continues to whip her until he thinks she’s crying the right kind of cry, and uses that as a model of Christian discipline–was rather alarming to me. (I hope I’m not saying too much here, I just think we should be Bereans in reading books written by other Christians as well)