Sheila: What if the way that you’ve been taught to parent in Christian circles has also been leading to damaging relationships with your kids, with your spouse, and even with God?  That’s what we are going to talk about on today’s Bare Marriage Podcast.  Hello, and welcome.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  But you know what?  The same trends that can so often make our marriage advice toxic in Christian circles also makes our parenting advice toxic.  And so today we are going to have an interview with a couple who has written just an amazing, amazing new book on parenting that I hope will become the standard for what we use so I’m excited to bring that to you in just a minute.  But first, we have a couple of announcements.  Our new book The Marriage You Want is now available for preorder.  Last winter, we asked as many of you as possible to take our marriage survey, our matched pair survey, and that is all done.  The book is all written, and it is coming out in March.  When you preorder it early, you help Amazon know hey this book is going to sell really well so they order more so they don’t run out on launch day which is really crucial.  And also the more people who order it, the more Amazon tends to lower the price, and other platforms lower the price too if you don’t want to buy through Amazon.  And when it rises up the ranks and ratings, then bookstores, other retailers tend to order it as well because they know oh this is a book that’s going to do well.  So by preordering it, you actually really help this book spread so if you know you’re going to get it anyway, and it is honestly awesome, please take a look and preorder The Marriage You Want today.  The link is in the podcast notes.  And I want to say a special thank you to the group of people who let us—who made it possible for us to do that marriage survey, and that would be our patrons who give us money every month to support what we’re doing for as little as $5 a month, and they get to join an amazing Facebook group where we talk just about everything, and people are talking about their issues with faith, and with finding a good church, and with processing the parenting and marriage advice we’ve gotten.  And it’s also where we get to try new things out and new thoughts out.  I posted a Fixed-It For You in the patron group the other day where I didn’t know how to fix it.  I just knew that I wanted to fix it, and they gave me so many great ideas that I actually published ten different versions last week on Instagram and Facebook.  And so it’s a wonderful group, and you can join again for as little as $5 a month.  And then there’s the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation which is our nonprofit in the U.S., and when you give money there, that’s what also funded our marriage survey.  And you can get a tax-deductible receipt within the United States so check out both of those things.  The links are in the podcast notes, and now without further ado, I would like to turn to our interview.  Okay, everybody, I am about to give you an interview that I have been so excited about for over—I don’t know.  It seems like it’s been over a year since I read the early version of this book to endorse it.  This is awesome, and I have David and Amanda Erickson authors of The Flourishing Family with us today.  Hi, guys.

Amanda: Hi, thanks for having us.

Sheila: Oh, yeah.  Oh, yeah, this is going to be an awesome conversation.  This is a conversation everyone loves, everyone has been waiting for, and we’re going to talk about how to do parenting with the heart of Jesus.

David: That’s right.

Sheila: And not with fear, and I love it.  I’m here for it.  This is great.  You guys—David, you are the president of—what is it?  Jacksonville Christian College.

David: Yes.

Sheila: Jacksonville College.  You have a Ph.D. in theology so you’re a seminarian.  You know what you’re talking about, and you guys are parents.  How old are your kids now?

David: They are eight and ten at this moment.

Amanda: Almost nine.

Sheila: All right, two boys, right?

Amanda: Two boys, yeah.  And we started our parenting journey in foster care actually with a 10, 11, and 15-year-old sibling group of all boys.  So we’ve done the boy thing.

Sheila: Right.  All right, and I truly, truly love this book.  This is the book that I have wanted to be out there because it’s just—it’s talking about how to parent in a healthy way where you take into account the Bible, but you also take into account brain science and child development and peer reviewed studies, and everyone listening is hearing, “Yay, yay, yay, green check, green check, green check.”  So this is great.  And I want to take us through the book.  You start with a quote that I’m going to ask you just to talk about because you say this early in the book because you’re setting up why you started rethinking parenting.  You said, “Even so as our two boys grew into toddlerhood and parenting became more challenging we began to notice a very real disconnect between our actions as parents and the biblical and theological principles we claimed were most important to us.  The things we said we believed about God, grace, sin, repentance, and more didn’t seem to line up with how we were trying to discipline our children.”

David: Yeah, that was what really pushed us to rethink things.  Of course, I’m a theology professor so I’m always thinking theology, but thinking about like okay I want to disciple my children.  I want to communicate these kinds of things like I’m—we’re reading these board books at that age of different Christian concepts, and then thinking through then but like my actions when I’m getting angry, when I’m yelling, when I’m trying to figure out how to discipline—my actions are not teaching them about this father in heaven who loves us so much that he sent his son to sacrifice himself for us.  All of these things—this God of grace that I want to introduce my children to, the words are there, but the actions are different.  That just became a real feeling of—

Amanda: Tension.

David: Yeah, tension, for both of us in trying to think through okay what are we really doing here?

Sheila: I would like to take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor for this podcast and that is Ever, AJ.  They make the most beautiful, cute, fun, functional, vegan Bible cases, and I’m totally serious.  When they reached out to me to see if they could sponsor, I was so excited because now I get one.  And they’re amazing.  They have regular floral Bible cases with lots of areas to put pens and paper and notepads, and they’re just really attractive and modern looking.   They also come in crossbody purses, in wristlets, and more.  At Ever, AJ, they’re inspiring purpose and beauty with faith and function, and they’re mission is to provide beautiful yet functional products for women that align with their Christian values, and so they create products that enhance both practical needs and aesthetic preferences while cultivating a desire for the Lord.  And honestly it seriously is both practical and aesthetic so please take a look at the link in the podcast notes.  If you’re looking on YouTube, you’ll be able to see some of these amazing products on the screen now, but when you support our sponsors, you help support our podcast because when our sponsors do well, it’s so much easier to get other sponsors.  This helps keep us on the air so this makes an incredible Christmas gift for a woman in your life—your daughter, your sister.  If you bought our Kingdom Girl’s Bible when they were our sponsor a couple of weeks ago, this is a great chance to get a cover for it that is so pretty so do check out Ever, AJ.  The link is in the podcast notes.  Yeah, and Amanda, you were talking a lot about just the daily frustrations when you’ve got little kids, and you want them to behave, but then you’re yelling, you’re losing it, and that’s not what you want to teach them.

Amanda: Yeah, so in the book we—I share quite a bit about my story with mom rage which for me was a big indicator of postpartum anxiety, but it took a very long time for us to realize that’s what was going on.  And so until we knew that’s what I was dealing with, there was just all this shame and guilt about why I wasn’t the mom that I always thought I would be, that I wanted to be, like in the thick of it truly desired to be, and there was just this inability to really meet the goal in really anyway sometimes.  I was not—I wasn’t being the mom that I wanted to be, and—so while we had sort of been taught the approach to discipline needs to be calm and it needs to be really shrouded in love and gentleness, like when my kids misbehaved like there was sort of just this innate anger, and we have to make this stop right now, immediately.  And so not only were we wrestling with the actual way we were acting but like the quote that you read like even thinking about everything that I want to be when I’m having to discipline my children—calm and kind, calm and love—I’m going to do this in love.  That’s still when we hold it up to the image of the gospel, there’s some major holes in this approach.  There’s some major—there’s a major disconnect, and so that kind of—the two things definitely influenced my mom rage and being able to do it with the way I thought I was supposed to combined with like this isn’t lining up with what we believe.

Sheila: Yeah, and in your book you’re trying to build step-by-step how we can think about forming our kids’ character and shaping our kids’ character and instilling wisdom in them.  And it all starts with us.  That’s what you say at the very beginning is we can’t even try to start teaching our kids wisdom until we confront things in ourselves, and that’s what you’re saying.  I was losing it.  I didn’t want to lose it.  And so yeah, it does start with us.  So I wonder you know when you’re in a grocery store and a kid is just having a meltdown in the line, and you see the parent trying to get a handle on it and often yelling or swatting or threatening or bribing sometimes—whatever it might be—but so often the motivation when our kids are having these meltdowns even if they’re not in public, even if it’s like at home, and our kids are going haywire, and they’re not getting along, I think we feel like this reflects on me, right?

Amanda: For sure.

Sheila: Like them going haywire reflects on me, and so I need to clamp down on it because I don’t want people to think badly of me, and I don’t want to think badly of me.

David: Yeah, there’s a lot of that in parenting, like we invest a lot of our identity into our kids’ behavior.  I mean we were—I don’t know if we were more prone to it.  We live a fairly public life.  I’m a college president in a pretty small town so what my kids do is going to get around.  That’s just reality for our family, and so to make the decision like okay my kids’ behavior is not like my report card.  It is not how I’m going to make my self-identity around them being well-behaved kids at all times.  And even to recognize and to allow people to recognize, it’s okay.  Your kids are still kids.  I remember distinctly we were in church and sitting behind us was—I was the seminary theology professor at the time, and sitting right behind us was the former president of the seminary.  And he’s in church right behind us.  And our kids were not doing great that particular Sunday morning, like it was a noisy, noisy hour on our pew, not like a terrible—

Amanda: They were little.

David: They were very little kids, and afterward, this distinguished gentleman, he just—he was so gracious, and he was like, “Your kids are so wonderful.  It was so good to see you in church this morning,” because he was like they’re kids.  They’re kids, and there’s nothing wrong with letting a kid be a kid even in church when it’s not quite meeting social expectations but it’s actually normal for kids to be exactly who they were.  And so that’s a blessing sometimes that we miss because we get so focused on what are people going to think about me, and most of the time people are thinking, “Wow, having a tough time today.  I’ve been there.”  They’re not making this big judgement about like you must be terrible because this is happening in public.  No, we’ve all been there.  We’ve all had it happen to us, and for the grandparents, they know in general they turned out fine.  We all did, you know.

Sheila: Yes, yes.

Amanda: In the book one thing—I just want to follow up on that though because if our identity is not going to be in our motherhood, our parenting, how well-behaved our children are, I think it’s really important to note that as Christians, our identity has to be securely rooted in Christ and who we are in Christ because that gives us the resilience to withstand our children not making us look good.  Those moments where maybe there are people and you can feel their judgment or it’s perceived but it for sure feels real, we have to be rooted and grounded in who Christ is and who he is calling us to be and not in make them shape up, sit up, stand up, do better right now because there are people watching.  And so I just want to make sure if we’re shifting our identity and it’s not about our kids’ behavior, we need to know where it is, where we find it.

Sheila: Exactly.  Okay, so you guys get into how we’re going to shape our kids’ behavior, but like I said, you say it starts with us.  And one of the things that I think parents can all relate to is that feeling of losing it with your kids where yeah they’re just going haywire, and you yell, or you say things that you regret, or you’re just trying to control them, and that’s not what we want.  And so if it starts with us, we need to understand why we do those things, why we react that way, and you talk about the stress response cycle.  So I love that you’re getting into science right away which is great.  Can you explain what that is?

Amanda: Yeah, you want to do it or you want me to?

David: No, go ahead.

Amanda: So the stress response cycle—

Sheila: I feel like Amanda goes through this morning just from reading the book.

Amanda: Yeah, I for sure used to.  The stress response cycle is I believe it’s God-given.  I mean it serves a very important purpose of protection and survival, but it basically starts involuntarily in the brain when the brain perceives a threat whether or not that threat is legitimate and real by the way.  It’s just if the brain perceives the threat, and it floods your brain and your body with all of these hormones and chemicals to make you ready to survive whatever that threat is so to fight off an angry dog or to run to grab your kiddo out of the street if they’re heading that direction.  It can also cause you to just sort of start appeasing the person who or the situation who is causing a threat.  That’s the fawn response.  And it can also just cause us to shut down and be like nope I’m done.  I’m not going to do this anymore, and when that stress response happens in the brain, our ability to differentiate—well first of all, it causes our threat detection to be like hyper aware so then it’s like so many other things can be perceived as a threat and there’s not a good differentiation between what is real and valid and what is not.  And when we get through the end of a stress response cycle all those hormones kind of naturally cleanse out of our body, our heart rate calms down, our blood pressure comes back down, we come back into a place of peace and calm in the body physically, biologically in our body, and the problem that I found in parenting is that there was not a complete stress cycle always happening because just as soon as I got the boys separated from hurting each other, they were maybe letting the dog out and we live on a busy highway and I’ve got to go make sure the dog doesn’t run in the road.  And so there were these perceived threats, and sometimes valid—but for me with the postpartum anxiety, a lot of times it was like this is not as big a deal as your brain thinks it is.  There was never a good completion of those stress cycles, and so there was just this buildup of tension and stress and anger and rage biologically, like in my brain and body, and I had to learn to recognize this is something that’s actually going on.  It’s not simply a lack of moral character.  It’s not simply a lack of spiritual maturity, like I was still praying all the prayers.  I was still reading my Bible.  I was trying to do Bible studies and like Lord take this away, and there was a missing element because I needed to proactively do activities that were going to help my body finish these stress response cycles.

Sheila: That’s so key because you can just picture, right, your kid starts yelling at the other kid, and then you see that as a threat and so you get into a fight response, and so then you start fighting back, and your heartrate elevates and that causes them to do the same thing, and it’s just this terrible, vicious cycle.  Yeah, and if you don’t have a chance to get out of that, then you’re just so easily triggered by anything that happens.  And just to show you how practical this book is, I want to read to you one of the little sidebars because the book is filled with sidebars about really, really practical ways that you can put all of this into practice, and they have eight ways to complete a stress cycle even with little kids.  So here I am sharing with you parenting gold here, everybody, so listen to this.  Eight ways.  One schedule a dance off with your little ones before supper.  I love that because yeah, when we get our heartrate going up, it does calm the body’s trauma response.  Two take ten minutes during naptime to practice mindful breathing.  Just get your body back.  Three schedule an at-home date night and watch comedy that makes you belly laugh because laughing gets you out of that.  Four go for a run, job, or swim.  Five paint and hide rocks with your children.  Six find art lessons online that you can do with your child because again doing these creative things also gets you out of that.  Seven let your spouse get quality one-on-one time with your kids while you go out to dinner with your best friends because social stuff can get us out of that.  Eight jump on a trampoline with your kiddos.  So I love that.  Thank you for those.  Very practical.  Okay, so now, let’s—once we’ve dealt with our own stuff.  We understand why we’re reacting badly.  Let’s move onto the idea of fear-based consequences that we so often have with our children because this is our—because once you’ve dealt with your stuff, let’s talk about how we often discipline our kids and so often we’re focused on punishing them and scaring them and threatening them.  Do that again and I’ll give you a spanking, whatever it might look like.  And you talk about thinking about the long game here, and that if we go back to those stress response cycles, those trauma responses, a lot of those trauma responses actually look like obedience in children.

Amanda: They do, yeah.

Sheila: So tell me what you mean by that.

David: Well, I mean so—I mean can fear work as a discipline tactic?  Sure.  You can in certain instances scare a kid into not doing that again.  Like most punishment is intended to either scare them enough to make them think twice about doing it again, right?  Or make them feel bad enough about it to not want to do it again.  Like it’s fear and shame.  That is what punishment is generally designed to create in our children.  And that can short term work because—I mean God designed into all of us a natural fear and stress response.  That’s not bad.  That is a survival.

Amanda: (inaudible) responds more quickly to fear and danger stimuli than not, than secure and safe stimuli.

David: Yeah, and so when there’s—when things are genuinely unsafe, being afraid is the correct response from a parent or from a child.  The issue comes in when that’s not actually what’s happening and so as a parent we are trying to artificially create that fear, and what we’re hoping is that they will be afraid of that behavior.  But the problem is we are the ones enforcing that fear, and so what we lead into is that they become afraid of us just as much as they’re afraid of that behavior.  And that then begins to create distance and disconnect into the relationship which makes it much, much harder to actually get to our real goal because our real goal is actually a relationship of honor, a relationship of trust, and a relationship of obedience.  But that’s all built on trust and connection, not on fear.  Fear is a very short-term goal, and you know, what I encourage parents to do is like look out 20 years.  You’ve got a four-year-old right now.  Think about 24.  At 24 when this little girl is coming back to your home as a woman, what relationship are you hoping to have?  When she’s 34 and you’re hoping she’s bringing your grandkids over to visit, what relationship of honor are you wanting to have and what are you doing now at four-years-old to build into that relationship of honor and trust?  And sometimes that means okay we need to adjust what we’re doing here and now to build that relationship of trust so that it will be there in the teen years when it’s going to get really tested.  And it will be there in the adult years when we’re looking forward to this long-term, lifelong relationship of honor that carries on through the rest of our life.

Amanda: David wrote like one simple sentence in the book on the chapter on obedience like obedience is for the short term, but honor potentially is for a lifetime.  And how we go about teaching our children about obedience and to obey can very much impact that lifelong honor potential because we are lording power and authority over them.  There’s a very real possibility that their esteem of us is going to diminish the more we try and control and coerce them.

Sheila: Right, and I think this is such a big point that we need people to hear because this is the fundamental shift that needs to happen in Christian parenting teachings because so much of Christian parenting teachings is based on you need to control this child who is rebellious and sinful so that you can get rid of that rebelliousness and sinfulness because they will never go in the right direction unless you come down hard on their innate rebellious and sinful nature.  And that actually isn’t true.  It’s not true biblically.  It’s not true scientifically.  It’s not true in terms of child development.

Amanda: And bad theology.

Sheila: Yeah, but this is what we’ve been taught.  And I think so many parents are scared.  We’re scared that if we don’t come down hard on their little rebelliousness, then we’re setting our kids up to make terrible decisions in the future and all this stuff so we have to come down hard if we’re going to be Christian parents, but what does God do?  How does God treat us?

Amanda: Yeah, it’s his kindness that leads us to repentance.

David: Yeah, it’s just—yeah, in some ways we set ourselves up to try to do the work of the Holy Spirit, like I am going to somehow through my discipline or through my punishments convince my child to not be a sinner.  And it’s like that’s just not how it works.  This is the work of Christ that we are trying to encourage and nurture in our children, but we can’t actually do it ourselves. 

Sheila: The other way that it’s not like Christ is that Christ says over and over again it’s the heart that counts.  It’s what stems from the heart that’s important, and so as parents we need to be addressing the heart not the outward behavior in the same way, and so much of parenting is focused on behavior modification so that we get these short term results like you say, short term success, but you don’t necessarily get the long-term effects because you may get a kid to obey you instantly, but that doesn’t mean that you shape their character because they haven’t learned to trust you.  They haven’t learned to bond with you or that they actually want to obey.  They just simply want to not get punished.

Amanda: Right.

David: Yeah.  I mean Ephesians 6 talks about children obey your parents in the Lord, and it talks about this being the first commandment with a blessing.  And so I do want my children to have that blessing, and I want other people for their children to have that blessing of obeying their parents.  It is kind of just a fundamental reality.  Parents are older.  They’ve seen some more things than kids usually have.  They have wisdom to share, and following in that wisdom generally will turn out better than rejecting and rebelling against that wisdom.  That’s just a general principal truth.  And so I want children to experience that blessing of following after their parents, but that’s all built on their heart being able to trust, to have that genuine heartfelt obedience, to not just—because God’s not just interested in the external compliance of people.  He’s not just interested did you do the sacrifice?  Did you pray the prayer?  Did you do things?  He is interested in the heart, and if we want our children to truly be obeying us, we have to be after their heart, and we have to be nurturing that heartfelt obedience, and that’s going to take much more than trying to control their body.  It is going to require nurturing a trusting, connected relationship that allows them to follow along after us in obedience.  No, it won’t be perfect.  Kids won’t be perfect in following after us, but we’re building that foundation for them then to be able to do that.  And we start out very young, and as they get older I mean so many parents who pursue this path they reap so many fruits of just joy and obedience in their children because they’ve laid this foundation where their kids intuitively trust them and have no question—like of course Mom and Dad have my best interests in mind.  I still may not want to do it because A, B, C, but they have that foundation, that knowledge going in.

Sheila: You know, and I can honestly say this.  We never disciplined our kids as teenagers.  I just don’t think that we did.  We just had a great relationships with our girls as teens because we were really connected, and they just made really good choices.  And I know a lot of that is—it doesn’t work out that way for everybody.  Everybody has—kids can go off the rails even if you did everything right so I’m not trying to say that was entirely due to what we did.  I’m just saying this idea that teenagehood is going to be terrible.  It actually doesn’t need to be because if you’ve built that connection and that trust in those younger years, it can actually be quite fun.

David: Yes.

Sheila: It absolutely can.

Amanda: Can I circle back just to the instant obedience because our boys and I actually had a conversation about this over the summer.  We were reading in Mark, and I think it’s in Mark chapter 1.  It might be in chapter 2.  Jesus—he comes upon a man who is possessed by a demon, and Jesus commands the demon to leave the man, and the demons obey like instant obedience.  And I was reading this with my boys, and I was like hold up because if the way—the faith tradition that I was raised in would have used this as look even the demons obeyed Jesus instantly which means that’s what we need to do when really the reality of it is these demons do not trust Jesus.  They’re not going to hear well-done my good and faithful servant at the end of time.  They are not a part of God’s working out his vision for the world and humanity and ushering in the kingdom of heaven.  They are not a part of any of that, and they obey him.  There has to be more to God’s desire for obedience than just doing what I said because I said so because they have no relationship with Jesus, and they obeyed him.  Like obedience without relationship, without trust, without honor, that’s nothing.  There is no fruit in that.  They are demons.  There’s no fruit in that.  And so I just remember reading that.  That’s not in the book.  That’s (inaudible), but there has to be more to obedience than just—to obedience to Christ and therefore our children’s obedience to us than just like you do what I say when I say so.

Sheila: It reminds me of the Shiny Happy People documentary that we’ve talked about on this podcast before, and some of the Duggar women’s memoirs that they’ve written since, but they had that instant obedience.  And when you actually look at what happened to them as kids, it was like you said so often our kids’ obedience is actually a trauma response.  If the trauma responses are fight, flight, freeze, and faun, well, freeze and faun can look a lot like just obedience even when it’s just fear, right?  It’s not actually changing anything, and even flight can too to a certain extent if they go to their room or they get out of the situation.  That can look like oh look they’re obeying.  They’re good kids, and that’s what everyone thought of the Duggar kids, but they were reacting out of trauma.

David: Yeah.  This is where I quote traditional parenting methods, like they seem to work for a moment until you have a spicy kid who has a fight response, and then it’s like this isn’t working.

Amanda: And then we label that kid as difficult when really like maybe all of our children are actually responding in a stress response, but some of them are the way we want them to, and in our spicy kiddo it’s a fight.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah, so the point instead is to work on connection because if we have that connection, we can grow the trust and then obedience comes because they actually want to obey us.  They feel connected to us.  They want to do what’s good.  They want our approval.  They want to be good which is the way that God treats us too.  And in this section on connection, you talk about attachment.  You talk about what secure attachment looks like and how kids—kids are designed to actually need us.  I remember when I was a young woman probably in my late twenties I had two little girls, and there was a family in our church that had a lot of kids, right, like a lot of kids.  And in those days I kind of assumed oh wow they must be super Christians then because they have so many kids.  And the dad told me that whenever a baby was six, seven, eight months, and they would throw the spoon off the highchair or they would try to grab the spoon when they’re trying to be fed, he would smack them.  And that taught them they weren’t supposed to do that.  And I heard this and I thought wow that’s really harsh.  I never did that, but it never—I thought well he must really know because he’s got all of these kids.  But children are too young to make that connection at that point, and so all you’re teaching your child is to be afraid of you and to break connection.  It reminds me last night on Facebook we’re recording this at the beginning of September, but last night I posted a Fixed-It For You of a Gary Thomas quote which talked about how if you’re in the middle of making love and the baby cries, the wife has to get up and get the baby.  And suddenly the power shifts back to the wife because now the man takes second place or whatever.  I mean so many things wrong with that quote, but—

David: Yeah, the husband could get up and take the baby.

Sheila: Exactly.  The husband could get up too.  And believe me, she doesn’t feel super powerful right then, but, you know, the power shifts back.  And I had a number of people say—

Amanda: That was a Wonder Woman outfit.

Sheila: Yeah, I had a lot of people comment saying, “Yeah, my husband told me when our kids were babies, and they were crying that we had to finish making love first because I had to show him, and the baby needed to learn the husband was still the most important in the family.  And the marriage relationship was the most important.”  And you hear this a lot in Christian circles.  Let the baby cry.  Don’t come to them immediately.  They have to learn they’re not the center of the universe, but the thing is a child is the center of the universe because they’re incapable of thinking of it any other way.

Amanda: Yeah, I mean for the first four months of life the infant brain does not even recognize that it is yet separate from the mother’s body.  Like no, that child needs to be responded to as quickly as is possible.  I say that with the mom in mind who has postpartum anxiety and is like I’m going poop and my baby is screaming, and I feel like I have to go as quickly as possible.  Don’t put that pressure on yourself.  You have to do what you have to do, but the baby—don’t purposefully ignore it to teach it a lesson.  It doesn’t know that it’s not part of your body for the first four months.

Sheila: And the great thing—let me just say this about attachment science too is that you do not have to be perfect to have secure attachment.  You just have to—the kid needs to know that my needs are going to more or less be met, and that’s fine.  So you do not have to be perfect.  Yes, sorry, go ahead, David.

David: Well, I mean that gets into this kind of bigger point about like child development and just understanding how children develop over time and no, your two-year-old does not really have empathy for your three-year-old or your four-year-old.  That’s not really possible for them.

Amanda: Your three-year-old doesn’t have empathy for the two-year-old either.

David: No.  That’s why there’s so much contention in these young years.  And just—and so we can spend a lot of our time trying to compel our kids to develop faster, right, to become older than they actually are.  And it doesn’t work.  We’re never going to discipline our child’s brain into becoming more than it is.  They are who they are.  This is a process designed by God.  It is slow.  In the thick of parenting, there are weeks when you’re like when is this ever going to end because this thing we’re doing right now where my child just figured out they can take off their diaper and oh my lanta, it is terrible.  And we’re cleaning up so many things, and then, you know, a month later it’s all over.  Life has moved on.  They have changed, and it’s all in the rearview mirror, but in those moments it just feels like forever, and it’s never going to end.  And so that’s when we have to go back to okay my identity is in Christ, not in what my child is doing.  With Christ, we’re going to get through this.  We can figure out a way to work through this, and by God’s grace, we’ll make it, and my child will grow out of this.  This is the one thing that grandparents know that parents don’t always know.  Most of the time they grow out of it.

Sheila: Yeah, but also you know, when your kid is doing something that’s annoying you or when they’re biting when they’re 14-months-old, that isn’t a sin thing.  They’re not—it’s not a sin instinct.  It’s a wow this feels really good to bite.  And I don’t know how to regulate my emotions yet.

Amanda: Yeah, we have a resource—a free resource on our webpage called Ages and Stages, and it’s really just child development for Christian parents.  And when we were researching for that and preparing for that, I was doing a little bit of research and I had not heard this before so it’s not in the book, but toddlers do not actually have a—the capacity to differentiate between something is valuable because it is alive, it’s a person, it’s energized by the Spirit of God, or anything like that, and an object—an inanimate object.  They don’t differentiate between this is an animal and this is a plastic car.  They don’t have the developmental capacity for that yet, and I was like well, you know, I probably wouldn’t have been quite so wigged out when my kids were toddlers if I had known that.  You know, like some of these behaviors, like why are you like torturing our dog by pulling her ears every single day?  Okay, you don’t actually recognize and have put all the pieces together yet that there is a difference between this living animal and the toys over here that we set up for you to pull on, that we gave you to pull on.  I think the lack of—the lack of knowledge of child development in Christian circles is fundamentally—it puts Christian parents at a disadvantage because it gives them a reason to view everything as sin and to pair that with just a twisted theology that somehow we are responsible for absolving our children of sin.  It puts such a burden and pressure, and so parent—this is something that we realized for ourselves—parents who are using fear as their primary method of discipline, they are often doing it out of fear themselves, and they may not even realize it.  They are living with fear and this pressure, and this stress themselves, and they’re not even aware of it.

Sheila: Yeah, absolutely.  Then to get back to the dog.  You can actually teach your kids not to pull on dog’s ear.

Amanda: Yes.

David: Yeah, there’s a reality of like okay in child development they’re only so far along here, but so we can expect these behaviors to happen.  That doesn’t mean they are acceptable or that we need to live with them, and we need to let them mistreat our dog.

Amanda: Wait, I want to hear her.  It sounds like you have an attainable—like very practical way.

Sheila: No, I mean you can just teach them that they can’t do that or they can’t be in the same room with a dog.  You can just protect your dog.

Amanda: Okay, I thought you had a magic—

Sheila: No, you can say this is what we pull on.  You can give them a special toy that they get to pull on or whatever, but yes, you just don’t approach it as how could you possibly torture the dog?  But oh look at how—

Amanda: Or you’re doing this after I told you not to so you’re disobedient, right, yeah.

Sheila: Protect your dog.

Amanda: Yes, absolutely protect your dog.

Sheila: Our daughter, Rebecca, had the tiniest little Yorkshire terrier.  It’s passed away now, but yes, our grandson just did not—was not nice to that poor little dog so they had to protect the dog.

David: You spend a lot of time throughout childhood teaching that like no that is not okay even though in the back of my mind I’m like yeah, kids do that.  That’s actually normal.  That’s not okay.  And so we need to teach, and we need to encourage, and we need to discipline so that they begin to learn to differentiate between this is okay, this is not okay whether we’re talking about actions, we’re talking about words, the way we’re phrasing things.  It gets more complex as they get older, but still there is that important part of discipline like no this is not socially acceptable.  This is not okay, and we’re not going to keep continuing to do this.

Sheila: Yeah, you just do it out of kindness.  You have another great sidebar on what gentle firmness looks like because that’s what you call it.  It’s like we’re going to be firm, but we’re going to do it in a gentle way.  And you say, for toddlers this might sound like, “You are so sad to leave the park.  I understand.  I’m going to carry you to the car because it is time to go.”  So they’re putting up a tantrum, you still carry them, but you tell them that you understand.  For young children, it might sound like, “I can tell you’re upset, and I want to understand why.  Match my voice so I can understand you clearly.”  Helping them talk in a reasonable tone.  You go on from that which I love.  But you talk about how the key to all of this is remembering the three C’s, and that it goes in a certain order.  You coregulate together.  You connect together, and then you communicate.  So if we’re going to teach our kids something, which is the communication part, we usually jump right to the communicate.  This is what you’re doing wrong, you can’t do this, you need to stop, but we miss those two things.  I have a story.  I’m going to let you guys tell me what you think, but let me tell you a beautiful story, okay?  This is my—this is like my most proud grandparent moment of my son-in-law and my grandson, but my daughter, Rebecca, used to have horrible issues with temper tantrums, and we didn’t understand the concept of coregulating or emotionally regulate when she was two.  And so we would do the timeouts.  We were trying to teach her that you cannot—you cannot control us, but in so doing, we were trying to control her, and it just never worked.  It was one of our worst parenting times, but we didn’t really know better in the ‘90s, right?  So I’m so glad that they know better now.  But Alex was three, and dinner was served, and he didn’t like something, and he was about to have a meltdown, and Connor leaned in and they touched foreheads, and Alex put his hands on Connor’s cheeks, and they just breathed together, and then they talked afterwards.  It’s like oh my gosh, this is so beautiful.

Amanda: Yeah.  No, that’s beautiful.  And it’s kind of healing to see it happening in the future generations, just to know that your grandson, that is how his brain is being wired right now.  Like how redemptive of a story it is.  You can see the redemption.

Sheila: Yeah, and if they had jumped into getting mad at him for starting to lose it because he didn’t like the food, he wouldn’t have been able to handle it, but after they did that coregulation, they could then have a conversation about how you need to eat three bites anyway.

David: Yeah, and see that’s the thing—sometimes coregulation, the ones we remember are the ones that took really long.  But a lot of moments of coregulation are very quick.  They don’t take very long at all to just connect with a kid for a few seconds and help their brain and their emotions head onto a different track and start going in a way that instead of escalating begins to deescalate, and then we can get to that communication part.

Amanda: Much faster.  Yeah, I wanted to just for your listeners to explain one quick thing of why it goes in this order, and that’s because when the brain is dysregulated or in a stress response, it is not going to be able to learn the really important lesson that we as parents are trying to teach as effectively or as efficiently.  So when we try to teach them the lesson before their brain is in a calm and secure state, we’re actually working against ourselves, and for kids whose stress response is freeze or faun, we don’t even know because we just think oh they obeyed us.  Oh, they did the thing.  But they’re not actually learning the long-term, valuable lesson of wisdom and understanding and perspective taking and problem solving because we’re trying to teach it while they’re dysregulated, and they need us to come in and coregulate with them like calm their body, calm their nervous system, connect with them so they know that they are safe, they are loved, they are protected by us even in moments of discipline, even in moments that are hard.  We are their protector, and because of that, trust is established or it’s reinforced, they feel safe.  Now they’re ready to actually learn the thing that we want them to learn.

Sheila: Okay, so what does this look like?  Let’s say you’ve got a seven-year-old boy, and he’s just been roughhousing, and he’s jumping all over the furniture, and he’s hurting his five-year-old sister.  You’ve told him not to do this before, but she’s crying, and he’s looking at you like he knows he’s in trouble.  How do you coregulate with him?

Amanda: Oh, start with sister if she’s hurt actually.

Sheila: Okay, yes, yes.

Amanda: Physical needs first.

Sheila: Yes, yes, yes.

David: Yeah, and also that gives—I mean one of the things we can unintentionally do is we can give a lot of emotional attention to misbehavior, and so we’re initially giving our emotional attention to the one that got hurt.  And so they’re getting the attention first.  The seven-year-old may still be bouncing around on the couch.  I don’t know.  It just kind of depends on how badly sister is hurt and how long this is going to take for her to calm down, but then we’re going to switch our attention to the seven-year-old.

Amanda: Yeah, and I mean at seven, you can even be like, “Hey, I can tell you want to bounce.  Go get on the trampoline, or go get the yoga ball.  I’ll help you in just a minute.  I’m going to take care of your sister.”  Like have the yes of what their body—their body has physical momentum, and instead of trying to put a stop immediate stop to it, try to bridge them over to what is an acceptable way to use that momentum so like we have a very bouncy kiddo.  He’s super wiggly, and like he watches movies on a yoga ball and like bounces while we watch the movie, and so we have an outside trampoline and we have a yoga ball for inside.  And like give him—give the child the yes of how they can keep moving their body in that way because that is going to keep—that is going to naturally actually if it’s jumping it will start deescalating because that’s a regulating rhythmic motion.  And instead of like putting on a hard stop which is going to invite a power struggle which if they’re escalated they’re probably going to say yes to, it just allows them to keep momentum in a safe and appropriate way.

Sheila: Right, and then you can connect after that.  So what would that look like?

Amanda: You can connect after that, yeah.  Oh man, connection is so—that’s so specific to kids.  For our kiddo who is super wiggly, it would really look like coming sort of alongside him in the movement and maybe getting on the trampoline with him and bouncing a couple of times, and then laying down on the trampoline with him and look at the leaves or see if we can see animals in the clouds or whatever.  And we’re talking like two or three minutes.  We’re not talking a 20-minute thing.  We’re talking about hey I’m coming out here and if you send your kiddo out to get on the trampoline and you’ve taken care of sister, and you have established this relationship that is maybe not completely devoid of fear, like Mom and Dad still lose it sometimes, but in general your response is calm, confident connection, then when they see you coming out the door, they’re not scared of you.  They’re going to stay on the trampoline and anticipate you coming and not be scared that you’re coming to teach them a lesson.  They’re going to be like a magnet.  Mom’s coming out to the trampoline?  Okay, and so then you have this relationship that is secure.  You spend a couple of minutes with them, and then you lay down, and you start talking about what happened.  And you ask questions.  “Tell me what happened.  How could it have gone differently?  What would it look like if you had gone and just jumped on the trampoline and let her keep coloring instead of picking on her?”  With a seven-year-old—with a toddler you can’t do that.  They don’t have the capacity for that.  But with a seven-year-old, you can start asking good questions.  Try and learn their perspective.  Help them know what to do next time, and then practice.  Be like all right, let’s go inside and try it.  Let’s go practice.  Let’s practice for next time.

Sheila: And you talk too about how to make amends and how to walk through those processes.  Yeah, make amends with sister.  We can’t go into all that here, but that’s all in the book.  It’s really good.  Yeah, that’s what it looks like because if you jump right into yelling at them about that, you don’t—you’re not actually going to change their—the trajectory of their behavior long-term, and that’s the issue because you want them to want to treat sister well.  You want them to want to not destroy the house.

Amanda: And I just want to say like from personal experience, we have a very real story of our boys like learning to pick on each other because it gets connection.  They’re going to pick on each other for connection with each other, right?  Those bonding hormones, they’ll come out when they’re really intense with each other, and I remember—they were probably six and seven, or maybe seven and eight.  And I was like hey guys, look this is why y’all are annoying each other.  The brain science of why y’all are annoying each other, and these hormones you can get them in a different way that doesn’t escalate your brother.  Here’s a list of four or five things you can do, and one of them was to pet your dog.  So all I remember our younger son for weeks, he would be like do-do-do-do.  I’m getting happy hormones from the dog.  He would start to go down the path of I don’t—I really don’t want to have to deal with this right now, and then he’d immediately be like no, I’m going to go get happy hormones from the dog.  That is how he would say it, and then one time his brother was having a really rough time, and he called our dog over and he was like, “Hello.”  It was like a cleanup on aisle nine type of scenario.  “We need happy hormones in the bathroom.”

Sheila: That’s so precious.

Amanda: You teach them how your brain works, and they know what to do instead, like they’re disciplining themselves at that point.  They are teaching themselves what to do.

Sheila: Yeah, I love that.  Okay, now let’s get into one of my favorite parts of your book which is you address spanking.

Amanda: We do.

Sheila: And I love this because you address it from the Bible and from child development and you use peer reviewed studies, and so I want to delve into this quite a bit.  I want to start by playing a clip, and this was sent to me by someone in this congregation.  I’m not going to name the congregation or the pastor.  I do have a YouTube link just so you know where I got it from.  People can do their own research if they want, but my purpose is not to beat up on this particular pastor.  But I think this is so common, this kind of message that Christians are hearing, which is you need to spank because it’s biblical.  The Bible tells you that you need to hit your children, and if you don’t, you’re in sin.  So let’s just listen to this pastor.

Audio Clip: When I was dating Angela, we had many—we were engaged actually.  We had many conversations about how many kids we’d have, and what our parenting philosophy would be, and how we would go about disciplining and punishing our children, and we did a Bible study on God’s model for punishing children.  Much of what we covered in that Arrows series last month, I went over with her.  We talked about the importance of spanking a young one, and if you don’t like that, again, take it up with the Bible.  Don’t take it up with me.  It’s all throughout the book of Proverbs, and it’s commanded for us to do that.  Angela and I were on the same page.  My loving parents are here this morning.  They raised me spanking my little behind, and I needed my little behind spanked.  Amen.  And I’m glad they did spank my little behind.  You say well didn’t that damage the relationship with your parents?  They’re here this morning, aren’t they?  Amen, and I love them, and they love me.  But I grew up getting spanked and my siblings getting spanked.  My brother, James—little rascal—he’s now  a missionary in Honduras.  When one of us was getting spanked, he’d put his ear against the door to listen and hear it happen.  He’d walk away laughing.  Anyway, good memories, but Angela didn’t grow up that way.  She didn’t grow up getting spanked by her mother and father.  And so intellectually she agreed with me, but then when it came time for me to go in the bedroom and spank one of the kids, emotionally she disagreed with me.  And I can remember many times she’d be standing in the doorframe like this.  “Don’t spank them.  They’re sorry.  They won’t do it again.  They’re good kids.  Please, please don’t spank.  Please.”  And I would look at Angela and I would say, “You need to get out of my way right now.  Don’t make me forcefully remove you from that doorframe.”  And she would move, and I would go in, and I would spank them.  And after some time, she began to see yeah this works.

Sheila: Okay, so a lot of red flags there.

David: Yes.  Yes.  It’s several things.  One is that there’s an assumption about what the Bible says, that the Bible is definitely pro spanking, and that’s an uninterrogated assumption that’s not been hermeneutically proven.  Then there is the—I guess the overriding of the mother.

Sheila: Yeah.

David: The forcing of compliance on the mother’s behalf even though her intuition is saying no this is not the way.  This is not the way to discipline this child, and that’s introducing all kinds of tension into the marriage.  It’s going to introduce all kinds of tension into the parenting relationship, into the relationship these children are going to have with their mother as opposed to their father.  And I mean children naturally differentiate—there’s momma’s boys and daddy’s boys, and momma’s girls and daddy’s girls, and all of that naturally happens.  But this is really amping that up where the mother is the protector and the father is the threat.  And long-term that’s really not going to work out well for anybody in this family.

Sheila: I think—it’s interesting that he says that long-term look I still like my parents, but the story that he told about his brother who used to laugh hearing his siblings spanked, that’s strange.

David: And that may be a childish stress response.

Amanda: It could be.

Sheila: Yes.

David: That’s one thing that can drive you a little bit bonkers as a parent.

Amanda: That’s true.

David: Because you’re being really serious and you’re trying to communicate to your child that what you just did was really serious and bad and they are laughing as a stress response.

Amanda: It’s kind of like the nervous giggle like adults do or trying to make a joke maybe in not a really appropriate time.  There can—that can be a stress—attempt at relieving the stress of the situation.

Sheila: But also this whole idea that you have to spank to get your kids to turn out well but his wife wasn’t spanked and he liked the way his wife turned out.

Amanda: Right?  Yeah, I noticed that too.  Well, this is interesting.  I was—the thing that stood out to me was that he said the words the Bible commands us to spank.  And I—in our book I think we lay out a pretty solid case that it is most likely from biblical research, Jewish research it’s most likely that the rod verses in Proverbs are actually speaking about teenagers and not young children, but even if we’re going to like give a very broad application and maybe there is room to say that the rod could be applied to young children, the Proverbs are not commands.  Like that’s where I was just like there’s—that is flat out lie that the Bible commands parents to spank their children.  It isn’t a command.

Sheila: Yeah, exactly.  You have a great chart in there on the false equivalency Solomon’s rod versus modern spanking, and we’ll put it on the screen now so people can see it if you’re watching on YouTube, but yeah, I’ve heard many scholars say this that there’s many different words for child in Hebrew that we translate child, and the one that is used is not the one for like toddler or young child.  It really is more for a teenager, and yet we use these verses to say that we’re supposed to be hitting our very small children, and that is not anywhere that the Bible says that.  So it is really scary.  But when we turn—and again if you want to look into the biblical reasons why these verses are not saying that, they really do lay it out so well in The Flourishing Family so yeah, David and Amanda do that really well.  So please get the book.  It’s really worth it even just for that although it’s worth it for the whole thing, but I also love that you quoted Gershoff and other studies.  So Elizabeth Gershoff did—is famous for her huge meta analysis of spanking where I think there were 160,000 kids included in that study.  Basically the conclusion was that spanking is either negative or neutral but never positive.  So in other words if you were spanked and you think you turned out well as this pastor was saying, it was despite the spanking, not because of it.

Amanda: Right.  Yeah, that was—I didn’t know if we were going to circle back to that or not.  I do want to say that I believe that parents who—that there are adult children today who were spanked and even maybe harshly by their parents and they still have a good relationship with their parents.  I do not think that those two things are inherently or always mutually exclusive, and that is because I believe in the redemptive power of Christ.  He can redeem any story, and he can restore any relationship.  And I genuinely believe that, but any time we take the way we were parented or the generation above us takes the way they parented us and attributes that mostly or all to how well someone turned out, we are very much misapplying—like we’re giving honor where it is not exclusively due.  There is honor your father and mother, but also like the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is powerful and active and we cannot misapply and misattribute the goodness of Christ to our parents spanking us and that’s why we’re good, contributing members of society today who go to church every Sunday.  No, like we have to hold space for the work of God in us.

Sheila: And like I said earlier with attachment, you can have a secure attachment with a parent who spanked you because they don’t have to be perfect to have secure attachments.  Yeah, like it’s not that this automatically meant that you didn’t turn out well.  It’s just it could have been different, and what if it was better.  And don’t we want better for our kids.

David: Yeah, and I want to encourage parents today like if you spanked, if you spanked your child ten minutes before you turned on this podcast, okay, this does not mean your child can’t turn out.  This does not mean that you have ruined this relationship, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.  You can start from wherever you are whether you’ve got a two-year-old or a 12-year-old, and you can start from where you are.  You can start putting Jesus at the center of your parenting, rebuilding that connected relationship.  It’s going to look very different at different ages, but it absolutely can be done.  And your children will be grateful for you taking this thing that either is a negative in their life whether they can communicate that or not or at best it’s a neutral in their life, going ahead and taking it off the table.  But I would say one thing that is super important is—we made the decision when our son was two.  I think he was two that we took spanking off the table.

Amanda: Completely off.  It was never an option after that.

David: But you have to decide what is on the table because kids aren’t going to stop misbehaving just because you stop spanking them.  They’re not going to stop needing godly discipline and so when you take a tool out of your toolbox as a parent you need to put other tools in to help you guide, encourage, nurture and to help you and their siblings and whomever else is in this family.

Amanda: And we have a quick reference guide of maybe 15 or so—

David: Right.

Amanda: —parenting tools at the end of the book, and the ages that maybe they’re most effective for and what it might look like.  So if someone is listening and they’re like okay if I’m convicted to not spank anymore, then what do I do?  We did our best to give you some ideas.

Sheila: Yes, and you talk a lot about how to figure out natural consequences, logical—how to figure out what consequences we can have in this situation, and yes, a lot of other tools which I thought was really good.  I think there’s a misunderstanding.  People often say well if we get rid of spanking then we’re just going to let kids run wild as if spanking and discipline are synonyms, and they’re actually not.  Spanking is punishment.  It’s not discipline.  Think of discipline as the same word as discipleship, the same root word as discipleship where it’s about teaching and that connection whereas punishment is about control, and we shouldn’t be trying to control our kids.

Amanda: Yeah.  We have—this is another interesting story that’s not in the book because it’s pretty recent.  We ended up taking YouTube off of our smart TV because—not because our kids accessed anything they weren’t supposed to but because there was one channel that our oldest was watching, and we just kind of noticed he was picking up some of the idiosyncrasies of this YouTuber and it was not aligning with our family values, with the culture of our home so we had a family meeting.  We talked about it.  We told him that we wanted to take off the—take off YouTube for a month and see if that—see if there was—and do an experiment.  Is there a difference in how we as a whole but especially you treat your brother and others and how you speak to each other and so we took it off for a month?  And he agreed, like okay.  Yep, everybody is onboard.  Buy-in from everybody.  During that month, he had a friend come over to spend that night, and there was a situation—there was just a situation where one of our boys did not immediately obey getting off the trampoline.  Circle back to the trampoline story.  There wasn’t instant obedience, and the friend said, “He should get grounded.  He didn’t obey right away.”  And my oldest said, “We don’t get grounded.”  And in my mind, I was like dang he currently does not have access to YouTube which some children in some families would think of that as grounding from YouTube right, but he was bought into this experiment and let’s learn.  Let’s gather more data to see is this actually influencing you or not and here’s why, and he understands the reason behind it and was willing to be an active participant in that.  And he’s not receiving this as punishment.  Like he’s not receiving it as I’m grounded from YouTube.  He’s receiving it with love and with correction and with let’s learn to do better and see if this helps us do better, and it was just really interesting to kind of see that dynamic play out with him saying that because at that time did not have access to YouTube, and he didn’t feel like he was grounded.  It was just interesting.

Sheila: I love that.  That’s really beautiful because that’s what we’re looking for, right?  When you think about the long-term, you don’t want your kids to just be compliant and to just obey to get out of something bad.  You want them to learn wisdom.  You want them to learn to make good decisions when you’re not there.

Amanda: Right.

Sheila: You certainly don’t want—I mean there’s the two problem areas.  One is that they just obey anybody and don’t learn to think for themselves at all which can really make someone open up for abuse, and the other is as soon as the control that you have over them is gone they’ll just do anything and rebel.  So you can have the super compliant versus the super rebellious.  You can have either extreme can come out of this kind of controlling parenting, and we don’t want either of those things.  I want to throw this back to you too.  I was in a conversation—several different conversations with different people over the weekend about spanking as I was getting ready for this podcast, and all of them had been spanked as kids.  And they all said very, very similar stories which was—they all had siblings who were being spanked too, and they all learned that if you cried earlier and cried really loudly, the spanking would be lessened.  And so they all learned that as soon as someone starts spanking, you just start wailing right away, and then you don’t get as many swats.  But there was always that one sibling who wouldn’t break.  Everyone always had that one kid who wouldn’t break.

Amanda: That was me.

Sheila: And they would get swatted more.  And I’m thinking what lesson is anyone learning out of that?

David: Yeah, and well that’s the thing is spanking doesn’t teach a lesson.  It’s purely designed to try to elicit fear or shame, to try to convince you not to do this again.  And that—it doesn’t meaningfully move the child towards actual wisdom, actual understanding of like this is what I did wrong, this is how I could do better in the future, this is what I should do in the future.  It doesn’t contribute any of that.  It just brings pain and disconnection that then makes it harder for us to actually teach the lessons that they need.  In so many ways, we kind of just leave our kids to figure it out.  Like I spanked them because they did wrong and hopefully they’ll figure out how to do right in the future.  That’s not really going to work.  They have to be—if we want them to as best we can, within the process of child development, within where they are and everything that’s going on, if we want them to do better, we have to start figuring out what better looks like.  I think that’s the most powerful parenting advice we got when—well, our first one was still in utero, okay, was figure out what you want them to do because as a parent it’s really easy to spot what we don’t want to do.  That is confronting us consistently—the things we don’t want to happen, they’re really easy to see.  And it’s a lot harder to figure out okay but when my child is doing that what am I actually wanting them to do?  Besides just stopping the thing I don’t want.  What do I want them to do?  Because once we can figure out what we want them to do, then we can begin to teach and encourage them to do that.  It’s not just about stopping something.  It’s about replacing, and this—I mean adults have to deal with this too.  When we have some kind of—an addiction, a sin, something—you don’t just stop by sheer willpower.

Amanda: You replace it.

David: You replace, and we do that for our kids too.  No, you can’t jump on the couch.  You can jump on the trampoline.  Let’s go to the trampoline.  No, you can’t hit your brother, but you can hit this punching bag.

Amanda: I want to say too though like when we think about the spanking them and stopping the behavior there’s also this—there’s also this other aspect of like I actually want my children to not fight and to problem solve and to consider one another’s perspectives and to be willing to serve not because if they don’t they’re going to get a spanking.  Like I cultivating a desire within them to do what is right because it is right, you don’t do that with a rod or a wooden spoon or a paddle.  They might get lucky and learn to do what is right because they don’t want a spanking.  They might.  Some kids are really smart, and they’ll figure it out, but that is not the same as their heart being pointed towards a good goal because this is what they desire and because it’s rooted in a relationship of love and trust with their sibling or their parent.  And that is the long game that we talked about at the beginning like being willing to recognize if I’m going to cultivate this, it is a long growth process.  It is a long journey towards maturity and understanding and wisdom, and I have to be willing to do that long work.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah, and that’s the work that God does with us.

Amanda: Yes.

Sheila: Like that’s how God treats us.  And I think so much of this comes down to our view of God.  When we think of God as someone who is just happy to punish in order to get obedience, yeah, we’re going to parent like that.  But what kind of a view of God is that?  That’s not Jesus.

Amanda: No, (inaudible) in the early church.  Like we see the apostles confronting sin in the church, telling them how to deal with sin—big sin, way bigger than walking up to your brother and poking him in the arm, like way big, big sin.  Sin that in the Old Testament was punishable by death.  And we see none of that in the New Testament churches.

Sheila: So good because this has repercussions beyond just parenting, but it has repercussions for how we see God.

Amanda: Yeah, absolutely.

David: See that’s—as a theology professor that’s part of what drove me to write this book, do this kind of work, is because seeing how people misunderstand God because I mean it’s one of those realities whether we like it or not, the way we view many times our father or our parents in general is how we just instinctively view God.  We just kind of naturally map that straight onto God.  Now that’s not accurate and truthful.  All of us were raised by imperfect parents.  God himself is perfect, and there’s a maturing process in learning to view God as he reveals himself to be not just as we experienced our parents.  But my goal as a parent is that my children could come to know God.  My goal for other people, for the people who read this book, people who are listening to this is that they would get glimpses of God through their parents so that as they grow and as they read their Bibles and as they’re looking at this, they would be able to say oh yeah, I know what grace is like because I’ve experienced grace in my home.  I know what these things are like because however imperfectly I have actually seen them in action, and so, our children are encouraged to develop a view of God that is accurate to who God is rather than just mapping this kind of evil—well, evil is not the right word, but like kind of foreboding, ready to punish, waiting for you to mess up kind of God which is absolutely not.  That is evil.  That is not what the Bible shows God to be, and instead seeing God through Christ as the one who sacrifices himself, the one who gives us grace, the one who is patient with us, the one who draws us towards faith and repentance, that they could see that through us.

Amanda: Yeah, and I just want to say too like—because I know some people who are listening, they’re going to be like well you just talk about the New Testament.  You keep talking about Jesus.  What about the Old Testament?  And I just want to point back to the very first time God reveals himself to Moses, Moses is like, “Show me your glory.  Let your glory pass before me.  I want to see your glory.”  And God says, “I will cause my glory to pass before you, and I will show you my mercy.”  He attaches his glory to mercy, and that is important.  It lays the foundation of how we should view the rest of Scripture and how we should not be surprised when God becomes human in the form of Jesus and comes to Earth and reveals the heart of God as a heart of mercy.  We should be expecting it.

Sheila: That’s so beautiful.  Thank you.

Amanda: Yeah.

Sheila: So I love this conversation.  Seriously this is going to be my go-to parenting recommendation from now on.  This is what we needed.  This is what the church needed.  I’m so grateful that you brought in like I said the brain science, and the theology, and the peer reviewed studies, and everything.  It was really well-done.  So and the book launched I think last week.  It is now available everywhere.  The link is in the podcast notes.  You can get it at Amazon, anywhere you want, but it’s The Flourishing Family by David and Amanda Erickson.  And where can people find you?

Amanda: Yeah, we’re on Instagram and Facebook at Flourishing Homes and Families, and our website is flourishinghomesandfamilies.com.

Sheila: Okay, I will put those links too.  I know that I refer to you a lot on Instagram.  People are always sharing your stuff so it’s a really good, great, encouraging channel to teach us how to think differently about parenting and showing us that yeah, there’s ways to discipline that don’t involve punishment.  You can still be gentle and firm without necessarily punishing.  So good.  Thank you very much for being here.

Amanda: Thank you so much for having us.  Yeah.

Sheila: I want to say thank you to David and Amanda Erickson for joining us on the podcast.  I really enjoyed this conversation, and I want to stress—we touched on only a few things in their book.  In The Flourishing Family there is so much more on how to figure out what are good consequences for actions, natural consequences so that we can have that kind of kind yet firm discipline that teaches kids but that doesn’t punish but teaches kids hey this is what I want to live like so they internalize your values and God’s values.  They have so much more on neuroscience, so much more on all kinds of things, and so I really, really appreciate their book.  I think this is the book that the evangelical world has needed so please check it out now, and the link again for The Flourishing Family is in the podcast notes.  And thank you again to our amazing sponsor Ever, AJ with their vegan Bible cases.  Seriously they’re so pretty, and they would make a lovely Christmas gift or just a treat for yourself which is also important, and remember when you support our sponsors, you support us.  So please check on that link.  It’s a wonderful small family business that they’re just trying to get off the ground, and I would love to see them succeed because these are lovely and they’re such great ideas so check out that link in the podcast notes.  And thank you, and we will see you next week on The Bare Marriage Podcast where we have some really special people joining us, Beth Allison Barr and Miranda Zapor Cruz, who are both professors, and we are going to look at the myth that 93%–when fathers come to Christ first, 93% of families follow whereas when mothers come to Christ first it’s only 17%.  And we’re going to show you hey—if you’ve heard that stat, it was made up.  It doesn’t come from anywhere, and we’re going to show you why so join us next week on The Bare Marriage Podcast for that. Thanks very much.  Bye-bye.