Heart Oriented Discipline & Instruction

Posted by Rachael | 0 comments

I love home schooling. While I am new to this and I still have the honeymoon feelings, I am still surprised at how challenging it is. I expected my first grade year to go quite easy. I am mean, how difficult is basic addition and English grammar? I can do all of that. My doubts lie in Chemistry but thankfully I have some years to learn! The struggle I was caught off guard with actually has little to do with school and more to do with attitude.

When planning for the year, I was focused on the details of our assignments together like learning how to spell, working on our penmanship, and determining to make memorization a priority. I have a schedule that puts school at the beginning of the day so I can not let other things fill up my time and procrastination to interfere with my HUGE responsibility.

My four year old (who has some formal instruction of 20 min a day) I expected a lazy attitude from. She, however, is thrilled to learn how to read and is quite motivated to do “hard work” in her words like folding towels to have the opportunity. My first grader, on the other hand, has shown me attitudes that didn’t really exist much before the routine of school. She really does enjoy parts of school. She loves our reading time, our history projects, and working with fractions while baking bread. Those things are fun in her mind but the “suck it up and just do it” parts of school like writing bring out the grunts and groans that speak words I really hate.

My challenge is not in finding ways to make writing fun for her. Some things in life are just hard work and you do them because they are important enough to do. Every time I look at the kitchen sink full of dishes, which seems like always, I want to grunt and groan as well (sometimes I do so maybe my example could be better!). However, if the dishes are not done by the time I need to prepare for the next meal I will be miserable and the dishes are important enough to do so I just do it. I wish there was a way to make dishes fun but I have not come across the idea. I know one way to make them NOT fun: a poor attitude. When my daughter has a poor attitude when we sit down for school, the pleasantness of school becomes a burden. Is this challenge my responsibility or hers?

I would venture to say the responsibility ball falls in my court as well as hers. I have been reading a book lately that has greatly impacted the way I think and respond to my children. In Don’t Make Me Count to Three! by Ginger Plowman, she makes some incredible statements that make sense. She explains that “we have to get them to think right and to be motivated out of a love of virtue rather than a fear of punishment. We do this by training them in righteousness. Righteous training can only come from the Word of God. Ephesians 6:4 says, ‘…bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.‘ We see the two [both discipline and instruction] together again in Proverbs 29:15: ‘the rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother.’ The behavior a person exhibits is an expression of the overflow of the heart. To put it simply, the heart determines behavior.”

The book goes on to give some amazing tools to utilize in the moments of everyday. She has helped me understand HOW to instruct my children according to God’s Word in a practical, effective way. My daughter has definitely made a poor choice in the attitude she has chosen but it is my responsibility to show her what God says about her attitude, what kind of attitude God desires her to have, and to show her how to have that attitude through practice. There will be times that discipline will be needed also but there will be times where the instruction will accomplish my goal all by itself and therefore alleviate me of any need to feel frustrated and angry. The Word of God truly is a two-edged sword.

For instance, Sara struggles with whining when she becomes frustrated. I asked her some heart probing questions, “Are you communicating with a self-controlled voice? How does God want you to communicate?”** and then proceeded to reprove her behavior by explaining that whining is an ungodly form of communication. I told her that God wants her to use self control, even with her voice and we even stopped school so she could copy what God says directly to a note card for her to be reminded by. (Ephesians 4:29 Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.) When the issue reappears, I ask her to repeat to me what God says about corrupt communication and ask her if she is ministering grace unto my ears. When I first began to implement these skills I was shocked to find that God’s Word worked so well. Perhaps I have an issue with exercising my faith but that is another article I suppose.

I am pleased to say that my children have been responding quite well to these “tactics” and I believe this is what God meant when he said, “You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. Deut 11:19”. The Word of God should be natural and easy and pleasant in our conversations. He should be apart of our every day. The hard part is figuring out how to do it. Ginger Plowman has helped me in that area. When do I plan for this you ask? Well, our children manage to create those moments with no help from us. So now all that is left is my own laziness. I won’t whine. I won’t complain. It may be difficult but it is necessary and important enough to do so I guess I will just do it.

**Footnote: Words taken directly from Wise Words for Moms by Ginger Plowman

Rachael is wife to a Navy Tubist and mommy to three children, ages 1 to 6. She is Director of a Classical Conversations group and a childbirth educator and doula. She works along side her hubby on their hobby farm and has a passion for kitchen experiments. She aspires to train and reach the hearts of her children that they may know the purpose of life is to know Jesus and make Him known to others.