If you’ve paid attention to parents with young children in recent years, you may have observed something previous generations would have found deeply puzzling: a mom or dad crouching in front of a tantrum-throwing child and—while seeking eye contact and maintaining a friendly tone of voice—saying something like this: “You’re feeling sad; you’re feeling big feelings. It’s OK to feel those things. I’m right here.” Several minutes later, when you turn back down the same shopping aisle, the child is still furiously demanding cookies, and the crouching parent is still saying the same thing.
You’ve witnessed “gentle parenting” (alternatively known as “respectful” or “responsive” parenting). It’s a school of thought made popular by Instagram influencers such as Big Little Feelings (the parent’s words in the scenario above were taken from a Big Little Feelings guide to handling tantrums); podcasts such as “Good Inside with Dr. Becky”; blogs such as “Lucy at Home”; and TikTok accounts such as thebennettgang. While most parents encounter gentle parenting through social media, it has a more academic side. Dr. Becky (her rarely-used last name is Kennedy) has a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University. Mona Delahooke and Robin Einzig, both of whom have influenced gentle parenting’s popular voices, also have academic credentials.
Creative Suggestions
Gentle parenting is hard to define in one crisp sentence. Jump into the world of gentle parenting and you’ll find a constellation of related practical suggestions rather than a grand unified theory. Some of the practical tips are brilliantly insightful:
Instead of issuing an instruction that may lead to confrontation (“Time to leave the playground!”), present your toddler with a choice: “Would you like to leave the playground in two minutes or five minutes?”
Instead of worsening a nasty atmosphere between two fighting toddlers (“What on earth is going on here?! Who started this?!”), defuse the tension with playfulness: “This room doesn’t have enough robots. Who wants to be a robot with me?”
Instead of removing a child’s pacifiers unexpectedly with a grim “tear off the Band-Aid” attitude, set a day on the calendar for the Paci Fairy to come and collect the pacis. Get the child to put the pacis on the front doorstep in an envelope. Then bring the child back later to find the doorstep covered in confetti and a wrapped gift.
I love those suggestions, and I love the general principle of being aware of children’s feelings and seeking creative ways to avoid treading on them unnecessarily. If gentle parenting were just a mood board for solving parenting difficulties in nonconfrontational ways, I’d have nothing to say against it. But when you dig more deeply into the underlying concepts of gentle parenting, you find at least two that stand opposed to the Bible’s teaching about parenting.
Two Unbiblical Concepts
The first unbiblical concept is that bad behavior (the gentle parenting term is “challenging behavior”) is caused by feelings produced by environmental, external factors. When parents respond negatively to challenging behavior—so the theory goes—it worsens the stress on the child, thereby escalating and perpetuating the behavior. If, in contrast, parents validate feelings, they give children emotional and physiological space in which they can draw from their own goodness to regulate their behavior, slowly building personal resilience.
“I truly do believe that we are all good inside,” writes Dr. Becky in her book Good Inside. “When you’re confident in your child’s goodness, you believe in their ability to behave ‘well’ and do the right thing.”
How is this concept applied in practice? One example is Dr. Becky’s suggested response to a child who has just told a lie about knocking down his brother’s block tower: “Well, if someone, not you, but someone did push down a tower . . . I think I’d understand. Having a brother is hard. Sharing is hard.”
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t grasp—and here comes a phrase you won’t find in an online gentle parenting course—the sinfulness of sin. According to Jesus, we aren’t good inside (Mark 7:21–23); according to Paul, even if we’ve figured out the difference between right and wrong, and even if we genuinely want to do what’s right, we’re still naturally prone not to do it (Rom. 7:19) because of our ingrained rebelliousness. Gentle parenting’s optimism about human beings is incompatible with Scripture’s realism.
Gentle parenting’s optimism about human beings is incompatible with Scripture’s realism.
The second unbiblical concept is that rewards and punishments only modify surface behavior without addressing inner feelings. There seems to be a spectrum here, with a few gentle parenting voices recognizing a need for consequences. But generally speaking, gentle parenting scorns rewards and punishments as the discredited tools of traditional parenting.
Christians should share gentle parenting’s goal of influencing inner feelings, which we might call shepherding a child’s heart. However, from a biblical perspective—and it’s hard to overstate the importance of this—rewards and punishments are a vital part of that shepherding.
Much could be said about rewards (if there’s a problem with offering them, someone should tell God), but the rest of this article will focus on the place of punishment in biblical parenting.
Pardoned in Heaven, Punished on Earth
Christians are so accustomed to hearing the joyful news of the forgiveness of sins that any talk of punishment can seem out of place. When Jesus died on the cross, he took our sin upon himself and drained the cup of God’s wrath down to the bottom. Those who trust in him face no further divine condemnation in their relationship with God (Rom. 8:1).
But that doesn’t mean we’ve been released from all punishment in God’s world. God is sovereign over our earthly circumstances and may lovingly use those circumstances to chastise us so we learn the error of our ways (Prov. 3:11–12).
What’s more, if our deeds deserve civil punishment, God approves when that punishment is duly administered. Paul describes the “one who is in authority” as “God’s servant” (Rom. 13:3–4), and he tells Christians, “If you do wrong, be afraid, for [the one in authority] does not bear the sword in vain. For he is . . . an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” Similarly, Peter urges Christians to submit to governors “as sent by [the Lord] to punish those who do evil” (1 Pet. 2:14). Neither Paul nor Peter thinks of Christians as having a God-given get-out-of-jail-free card.
What’s true for the Christian in society is true for the child in a Christian home. As we’ll see from the biblical evidence, serious wrongdoing by children should be punished, and God has given that responsibility to parents. I’m certainly not advocating for abuse. Excessive, sadistic punishment is a grotesque perversion of godly discipline. But misuse shouldn’t prevent right use. The presence of some dangerous drivers on the roads shouldn’t put a stop to all driving, and the existence of some abusive parents shouldn’t stop other parents from using punishment rightly.
Discipline and Punishment in the Bible
All Bible-believing parents can agree that “discipline” should be a feature of our parenting (see Eph. 6:4). The English word “discipline” may not necessarily bring to mind punishment, especially if discipline is defined as “training.” But Scripture wasn’t written in English, and when we study the meaning of the relevant Hebrew and Greek words, we see that punishment is integral to the Bible’s understanding of discipline.
In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word translated “discipline” is musar. Two examples from the Book of Proverbs show how closely associated musar is with punishment. Proverbs 13:24 says, “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline [musar] him.” Here musar is used as a parallel term for “the rod,” which symbolizes painful punishment. Proverbs 22:15 is similar. It says, “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline [musar] drives it far from him.”
When the Old Testament was first translated into Greek, the translators almost always used paideia as the Greek equivalent for musar. This shows that, before and around the time of Christ, paideia (which is the New Testament word for discipline) and musar referred to similar concepts. One especially significant example is Isaiah 53:5, where the word translated “punishment” or “chastisement” in the line “the punishment that brought us peace was on him” (NIV) is musar in the Hebrew and paideia in the ancient Greek translation.
Turning to the New Testament, in Luke 23:16 and Luke 23:22, Pilate twice says of Jesus, “I will therefore discipline [the verbal form of paideia] and release him.” Pilate almost certainly has flogging in view: in John’s Gospel, he has Jesus flogged and then presents him to the crowd in a bid to bring about his release (John 19:1–6). Pilate’s use of paideia as a polite stand-in for flogging reveals an aspect of the meaning of discipline in the world of the New Testament.
In Ephesians 6:4, Paul commands fathers to raise their children in the “discipline [paideia] and instruction of the Lord.” Paul’s understanding of paideia incorporates punishment: in 1 Timothy 1:20, he says Hymenaeus and Alexander have been “handed over to Satan that they may learn [the passive verbal form of paideia] not to blaspheme.” Most commentators agree Paul is talking about excommunication, the church’s severest punishment for sin. Paul’s use of the verbal form of paideia in that verse shows that punishment is necessary for the disciplining of Hymenaeus and Alexander.
Assessing the Biblical Evidence
The point here isn’t that biblical discipline is punishment. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul describes Scripture as “profitable for . . . training in righteousness”; the word translated “training” is paideia, and it would obviously be wrong to try to translate it as “punishment.” Instead, the point is that punishment is part of biblical discipline, an essential item in the discipline toolbox. Bible scholar William L. Lane’s definition of discipline captures all its various facets: “The biblical concept of discipline (paideia) combines the nuances of training, instruction, and firm guidance with those of reproof, correction, and punishment.”
From the Bible’s point of view, it’s impossible to shape a child’s character without demonstrating the seriousness of wrongdoing through retributory punishment. Words aren’t enough, because they’re so easily ignored (see Prov. 29:19). Painful punishment, administered by loving parents, drives home the message. I distinctly remember thinking, one time when my father was disciplining me, Oh. What I did really must have been wrong.
The Bible arguably stops short of mandating physical punishment because “the rod” can be viewed as a symbol. But if “the rod” is a symbol, it’s surely a symbol of painful punishment—the kind of punishment that a child will register as punishment. Loving parents are biblically required to make use of that rod (Prov. 13:24), and physical punishment is one way to fulfill that requirement. (It needs to be clearly stated that there’s no biblical justification whatsoever for the use of physical punishment in adult discipleship.)
Punishment is part of biblical discipline, an essential item in the discipline toolbox.
Alternatives to physical punishment that a child will recognize as painful punishment vary from child to child. I remember one family vacation when I was banned from swimming for a whole day. I’d been given due warning, and I deserved the punishment. As you can tell, I’ve never forgotten it because, boy, did it hurt.
Christians aren’t free to take a syringe to biblical words to extract and remove part of their meaning. Training and punishment are mingled in the biblical concept of discipline, and what God has joined together, let man not separate.
Implications Beyond Your Child
One day at a playground in New York City, when my son Solly was about 2 years old, an older boy sank his teeth into Solly’s shoulder. While Solly wailed, the boy’s horrified and deeply apologetic mother whisked her son away from the playground.
I don’t know whether that mother practices gentle parenting—she may have punished her son when they arrived home. And I’m not judging her parenting, because even the best-parented children can sometimes behave badly. The point of the story is that children don’t operate in vacuums. Their behavior affects others, and as they grow older, their behavior will affect still more people.
In the Book of Proverbs, folly is reckless behavior (Prov. 14:16), and the fool is a menace to everyone (Prov. 17:12). So when the Bible says “folly is bound up in the heart of a child” (Prov. 22:15), it’s not talking about children being silly. For the sake of the child and all those affected by that child’s present and future behavior, folly should be driven out. The biblical way to do that is by the loving use of punishment.
If a child’s folly remains, it will produce harmful outcomes, and the Bible assumes folly will remain without discipline’s rod. If we want to produce gentle children, we’ll need more than gentle methods—we’ll need biblical ones.
The Gospel Coalition