The folk wisdom proverb, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” requires us first to identify the difference between the baby and the bathwater. So let’s begin by considering how to separate the baby and bathwater in childrearing books.
Every book I mentioned has some really helpful things: Tedd Tripp’s aiming for the heart in discipline is manna from heaven; Baby Wise teaches that infants need a structure besides their wants, MacArthur and Beeke’s commonsense applications are often helpful. The problem is placing their wisdom into your situation and recognizing the limits of their suggestions and interpretation.
The Bathwater in Shepherding a Child’s Heart
Let’s start with an example from Tedd Tripp under his terrible-sounding category of emotional privation. As far as I can ascertain, “emotional privation” is the isolation and temporary withdraw of communication, fellowship, and comfort by an authority figure until repentance occurs. Tripp describes it in a family this way:
[The parents] place their misbehaving daughter in a chair alone in the middle of the living room for a specified period of time. As long as the child is being punished in the chair, no one in the family may speak to her or have any contact with her. She is isolated from the family. . . This approach is not only cruel, but ineffective in addressing the heart biblically. This young girl is not learning to understand her behavior biblically. . . . What she is learning is to avoid the emotional privation of being on the chair. Her heart is being trained, but not to know and love God. She is being trained to respond to the crippling fear of emotional privation (65).
What’s clear from the above quote is that “emotional privation” is cruel, ineffective, unbiblical, and does not teach children to “know and love God.” Awful. Who wants to be cruel, ineffective, and unbiblical and be detrimental to knowing and loving God?
Does the Bible say anything about “emotional privation?” Emotional privation is commanded by God to be used by the church in Mathew 18:17 and 1 Corinthians 5:11. Jonah’s experience was a bit extreme, but his time out was for three days. David assumes it as a discipline from God in Psalm 51, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” Taking away someone’s source of joy is by definition emotional privation. We find this discipline mentioned throughout the psalms: Psalm 13:1, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” Psalm 88: “You have caused my companions to shun me” (v. 8). And in verse 14, “Why do you hide your face from me?”
When we add to this God’s threat to exile his people when he tells his children that if they do not repent and obey him, they will lose certain blessings and access to the sacrifices and their prayers will not be answered besides being sent away (Deut. 30:1-6), it becomes clear that “emotional privation” is a consistent strategy of God in disciplining his children. God uses it throughout the Old and New Testament. Apparently, God thinks “emotional privation” is an acceptable strategy for discipline. God himself uses this method and commands it for the church.
But perhaps Tripp would respond that God’s relationship to his people is too dissimilar to a relationship of parent and child. This possibility is explicitly rejected by the Christ, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mat. 7:11). Further, God’s discipline and godly parents’ methods of discipline are explicitly linked in Deuteronomy 8:5, “Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you” (cf. Heb. 12:6-10).
So, it’s clear that God uses “emotional privation” as a strategy for disciplining his children and parents can use a similar strategy for their children. But how in the world is the newbie Christian or young parent isolated from their more experienced family supposed to figure this out after having read Shepherding a Child’s Heart? Wisdom and prayer. Tons of it.
Finding the Baby in Any Parenting Book
Wisdom. Wisdom is what allows us to recognize the difference between “Thus says the Lord” and any childrearing advice that should always be read as “This is what I think the Lord is saying about this circumstance.” Wisdom teaches us that we need God’s grace, and she teaches us to pray for more wisdom. Wisdom truly is more precious than gold. Wisdom is something that begins with the fear of the Lord, but is a lifelong process. We know this because the wise are always willing to accept correction (Prov. 9:8; 25:12). Wisdom is the ability to sort through applications of Scripture and then to use the correct application for your situation.
I want to close by also showing that wisdom is the ability to interpret Scripture and apply it to a particular situation: Proverbs 26:4-5 provides us with one of the most obvious text cases: “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
We have a selection of two opposed proverbial commands; to be used well the proverbs must be correctly interpreted in their textual context and the reader’s situation must be correctly interpreted and then the correct proverb must be applied. A component of wisdom is knowing the information of Scripture, but wisdom is completed by correct interpretation and application to particular situations. Wisdom is recognizing that one child will be crushed by one form of discipline, encouraged to sin by another form, and may respond best to a third.
In our next blog, I hope to build up our appreciation for God as our perfect parent and consider the mysterious art of hermeneutics through the writings of William Whitaker (1547-1595).