Discipline

Have you ever noticed that kids respond in different ways to discipline? Even kids in the same family, with the same corrective measures often respond in different ways. That's why I'm leary of any "Use this approach and it's guaranteed to work" programs or books. I once got a recipe for "Never-Fail Pie Crust" and I was afraid to use it since I thought I might be the first failure. I've felt like that with parenting books, too. My son was impervious to many of the techniques I'd read about and tried with him, and sometimes in retrospect I felt like they were more damaging than helpful. Our church offered a course once on raising kids, and even the title was intimidating since it claimed to be the way God would want us to raise our children. Well, I do want to please God and do things the right way, so my husband and I went through the course. The techniques no doubt worked for some kids and I've talked to people who say the program was a tremendous help for them. For awhile, I did what the program prescribed, but I didn't get the same results as the authors. Not even close. So I was left to think that either God's way doesn't work for my children - a scary thought - or perhaps He who created unique children has more than one way of loving and raising them.