[forty-two]

Originally Posted by Calee

Well, even if you (general) believe in sin nature in small children, you can still discipline gently It is not as if we are not discipline/teaching/leading at all-just differently than "they" think discipline looks like. Gentle discipline does not=no discipline.

I totally agree with you .

But lots of people see pain as an essential part of the discipline process, either for pragmatic reasons ("they won't listen if it doesn't hurt to not listen"), or for spiritual reasons (pain is somehow necessary because of sin - to pay for our sin, to be made aware of sin, due to sin it takes pain for us to listen (the last of which is basically the spiritual reason for the aforementioned pragmatic view)).

Showing how GBD is just as effective at teaching and guiding children - that it is a *different* way of disciplining, not *not* disciplining - will answer pragmatic objections. But it does not, in itself, answer the spiritual objections. Because there are lots of "successful by their outward forms" approaches to life that are Biblically wrong. And people who believe that punishment has spiritual benefit aren't going to abandon it just because a non-punishing approach can achieve the same *outward* goals - they need to see why punishment doesn't do what they think it does, that it is *not* of *any* spiritual benefit.

This was hard for me to wrap my brain around for a while (as most defenses of GBD I saw were from the perspective that children are not capable of making a conscious choice to sin, and so there was no reason to need to "make them aware of their sin" in the first place, and I am more on the total depravity side of the coin), but I realized that, whatever our view of how one's sin nature affects us and our children, we as parents still can't do even a smidgeon to fix or ameliorate the effects of sin on our children's hearts. Any which way you look at it, that's God's role, not ours. We humans can't change the heart. And any parenting approach that requires it is doomed to failure.

Which is basically my answer to the question. I can't parent the sin out of my child, and I can't parent them into salvation. It is all God - making them aware of their sin, removing sin and sin guilt and saving them - and us .

I can't do a smidgeon to "deal with the heart". And *God* is responsible for punishing sin, not me. The things people use pain to accomplish, spiritually speaking, are not up to us to accomplish at all , but God alone. And *God* uses His glorious Gospel to accomplish it , which is the very opposite of punishment . God does use punishment sometimes - but to *kill*, not to bring to life .