59 – If You Spank Them, You Must Hold Them

God made each child with certain talents and abilities. We naturally hunger for those things God made us able to do best. We discover those talents and abilities by sniffing them down through the nose of our desire for them. It is a thrilling mystery every time, for every person, for all of everyone’s life.

As children it’s easier to see, but it repeats throughout life: We misbehave when we have lost the scent trail in pursuit of our inborn talents.

A child who was born to be an entertainer will seek attention in all the wrong ways—especially if his quiet, orderly family denies him positive, proper, and constructive attention. Of course, the child also may lack practice with peers, but that’s a separate, related discussion. Then, there is proper discipline to explain the boundaries of respect and accepting the things that we cannot change.

People who grow up to be disrespectful probably were not disciplined when they were children to accept whatever things they cannot change.

When we hunger for love and healthy attention, our need is love and healthy attention, not discipline and correction. But, when we just don’t want to accept things that we cannot change, that’s when we need a swift, immediate, firm, well-explained, hand-on-skin, redness gone in thirty minutes, and, in all other ways, proper spanking—so that chasing the wind loses its pleasure. Neglected grownups don’t know whether children need love or discipline nor do they know the difference between discipline and beating.

Accepting what we can’t change is hard. Sometimes the entertaining child needs to practice being quiet in the presence of others—sometimes, not every minute spent at home. Those moments are difficult for everyone, especially the child. As much as the spanking hurts, it’s harder to let go of what earned us the spanking in the first place.

It’s hard to accept that we can’t change things we don’t like. Life isn’t fair. That’s one of the things we can’t change, so we must accept that unfairness will exist somewhere within our universe.

We get to be that child at times. God is right to spank us because He always holds us while we cry.