If you talk to ten moms, you'll pretty much hear ten methods of disciplining.  One mom stands her smart-mouthed child in a corner, another swats for the offense, while a third will make the child memorize Bible verses dealing with foolish talk.  Yet another will take away a favorite game or assign extra chores.  All strategies meant to stop the same action.  People watching any of the methods might take away the idea that "if my child does 'A', 'B' should be the immediate response.  No ifs, ands, or buts."  This is especially true if they're observing a particularly effective parent.

The trouble with cookie-cutter responses is that they tend to deal only with actions, not with the spirit.  Actions are tangible and visible and easy to pin down.  Charlie has just smacked Susie.  Charlie's now in line for some disciplinary action, whatever that may be.  Whether Charlie smacks Susie out of carelessness or meanness, the response is often the same.  But should it be?

A wise and very successful older father told me once, "I don't respond to a kid's actions.  I see the spirit in their eyes and that's what I respond to."

The spirit in their eyes?  Isn't that a little...vague?  Maybe even weird?

It's a lot more concrete and doable than it sounds.

One of the greatest secrets I've been blessed to have observed first-hand is the difference between training the spirit (or heart) and training the body.  I firmly believe this is one the biggest, most important facets to successfully raising a child to be a Godly adult.

The most effective parents literally know what's going through their kids' minds.  Not because they're telepathic, but because you can read a kid's mind if you know your own.  This requires a form of memory and truthfulness that sometimes takes a little work to cultivate, but it's essential.  If you start asking a mom what she sees on the faces (especially the eyes!) of her children, both you and she usually find she knows a lot about what's going on in there, both from experience with the child and memories from what she herself would've been thinking in their place.  She knows when the kid gets "that look", they're about to go touch the thing on the table they've already been told not to touch.  A lot of people have to spend a long, long time getting their kid to obey them because they wait until the kid has actually proved they're going to do the wrong thing by doing it:. They don't really believe their child is going to do the wrong thing, so they don't respond until it's already over and done.  Kids are innocent until proven guilty, right?

Well, not exactly. 

People are made alike.  We have personality quirks, but we have common characters - like Solomon said, there's nothing new under the sun.  You hear people every day talking in wonder about how they're turning into their parents.  Our spirits tend to have all the elements of our parents just like our bodies do and while we'd all like to believe we're terrifically unique, in many ways we're just the same as all the generations who've gone before us.  If our eyes really are the "window of the soul", as the Bible puts it, a child's eyes are the window to the soul every parent can look into and know how to respond to that child's actions - in the case of an observant and effective parent, while that action is still being contemplated and hasn't actually been committed yet.  Good parents look at the spirit rather than just the body.

The reverse - training the body instead of the spirit - tends to be both frustrating and ultimately useless.  A child can be taught all the motions of obedience and still not have submitted in his heart.  Eventually, the parents can't hold the child's body in check any more and he goes out and does whatever he feels like - the answer to the conundrum of how someone can be "raised right" and look fine as a youngster but be a complete wild man as an adult.

In order to train the spirit, though, you have to recognize what it really is.  You don't have to go farther than your own heart to find out a lot about that, especially if you throw in your own memories of what you thought and felt as a child.  In addition to yourself, there are a lot of other resources to help you see what people become and  tie it back to what your innocent little toddler is doing right now.  Understanding what you're seeing starts with knowing what people are capable of.

A mean and cruel person, for instance, can beat his wife, terrorize his children, and never know God.  We tend to recognize that cruelty easily; but a kid who only taps his sister with a finger and has meanness in his spirit has all the same intent as the man beating his wife.  Somewhere down the line, the man who's beating his wife and terrorizing his children was a sweet little boy who hadn't yet gotten to the stage he's at now: he wasn't born any more evil than anyone else.  So the sweet little child in front of me has all the same potential as that man, both good and bad.  It's in our natures to bend certain ways and unless corrected, that's where we'll go.  That's what "natural" means: the way something always is unless something or someone intervenes to make it different.  Our natural bent includes things like cruelty. 

Hard to believe when you're cuddling a fuzzy-headed little newborn, but necessary to believe if you want to get rid of the natural bent he was born with - along with, by the way, the capability to look exactly as Jesus did.  It's also necessary to believe in the good man God created a child to be even as you believe in the reality of him becoming an evil man if his spirit isn't taught.

People have trouble believing that they're capable of every evil thing humanity has ever been capable of.  "That mom might've run off and left her family to be with another man, but I could never do that."  "It takes a sick person to go out and murder innocent children."  We're shocked at the evil people can do to each other; but it's really hard to believe we're capable of doing exactly the same thing if we don't guard against it.  We have even more trouble believing an innocent little child is also capable of eventually doing those things.  A clear-eyed and observant parent knows their child has all the possibility of being the next Hitler just as they have all the possibility of being the next Joshua.  They watch the child's spirit for those parts of our shared evil nature to pop up and nip it in the bud before many outward observers could even see what it really was.  The little tap with the finger that was meant with the same intention as a punch.  The small pout that was the same as a scream and stamp with a foot; and as the wayward wife who ran off on her family.  When parents see both what spirit their child was born with - the spirit of all human beings born before them - and what parts of it currently being exhibited, it doesn't matter what the parents physically do to correct the problem because they'll do whatever it takes to prune that badness out.

So throw out the lists of "if, then" responses.  Study human nature and God's nature (memorize Proverbs - it's a book full about observations on God and Human nature).  Study your child's eyes to see what he's really doing before he actually goes and does it.  Learn to see and understand what you're seeing.  Stop the problem before it happens - however you do it! - and you'll be up there with the wise parents whose children are a joy and a comfort rather than breaking their mother's hearts.