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Sunday, January 28, 2007

86: When Parenting Affects Marriage

When Parenting Affects Marriage

Question: My husband and I are having a bit of a battle with our almost two-year-old son when it comes to discipline. We both believe in spanking, but our problem comes after the spanking. My husband spanks and then immediately picks him up and consoles him. I wait until about five minutes after the discipline before I will be affectionate. I don’t want to withhold from him the love that he needs, but I also don’t want him to think that I regret my decision to discipline. I also don’t want him to think that I am only being affectionate out of guilt from my decision to spank him. He already knows that we do it differently and uses it to manipulate my husband and me. He is the good guy and I am the bad guy. It is definitely starting to affect our marriage.

Response: That’s a great question.

We comfort our kids right after spanking them. The reason we do that is because the spanking is the punishment. After the punishment comes forgiveness, comfort, and a reaffirmation of our love.

2 Corinthians 2:6-8 The PUNISHMENT inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. Now instead, you ought to FORGIVE and COMFORT him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. I urge you, therefore, to REAFFIRM YOUR LOVE for him.

Now I can’t build an airtight case for how much time should occur between each step, but that just explains our thinking process. In any case, I don’t think that is the most important issue here.

Whether you wait five minutes or not isn’t really that big of a deal one way or the other. If you both agree to comfort him right away that almost certainly will work out fine. If you both agree to wait five minutes before comforting him that will likely work out fine as well.

What is not going to work out fine is if you don’t come to agreement. Jesus said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. This is already affecting your marriage, and that is going to have a far greater impact on your child than the delay time used before comforting your child.

I encourage you and your husband to talk it over some more. You can share your reasoning and he can share his. Then try to work towards an agreement or compromise. If you cannot come to agreement, then I suggest you yield to your husband in this. It’s just not worth having strife over.

God has made the husband the leader of the family. I don’t think it is because he is wiser, because that is certainly not the case in all marriages. He may have made the man the leader just because there needs to be a leader—any leader. There needs to be a leader to help bring unity when two people cannot come to agreement. Unity is often more important than doing things the “best” way. In other words, I think it is better for a couple to follow an option that is less than the best, than it is for the two to be at odds. (Ephesians 5:21,22; Colossians 3:18; 1 Peter 3:1)

A husband also needs to be loving, gentle, and considerate with his wife. So please don’t think I am advocating a shut-up-and-do-what-I-say type of atmosphere. (Ephesians 5:25; Colossians 3:19; 1 Peter 3:7)

So by yielding when you can’t come to agreement, you preserve the unity of the marriage. In the long run that will be the very best for your child.

85: Free Bible Quiz

Free Bible Quiz

Several years ago we started playing Bible quiz each night with our kids. We started out with easy questions like, “Who built the arc?” and gradually added more difficult questions as they mastered the easier ones. We tried to make if fun by managing it so they could always get about 80% of the questions right. After all, it’s only fun to be quizzed if you know most of the answers. In addition, I tried to have some questions that were weird, funny, or gross—kids eat up that kind of stuff. The kids loved the vast array of things they were learning, and the trivia questions would frequently spark other biblical questions that we would take the time to stop, look up, and discuss. Over time, we ran out of the off-the-top-of-your-head type of questions, and had to start adding in questions that were new to us. Before we knew it, some of them knew an incredible amount of Bible facts.

I’m really not interested in our kids knowing a bunch of senseless trivia. However, I am interested in them falling in love with God. Learning “trivia” helped them become more familiar with the characters, places, and events in the Bible. This made the Bible easier to understand, and more interesting to read. I believe this has helped them greatly in their spiritual development.

Like many parenting efforts, this was just a season in our lives, and we no longer do it consistently. It became complicated to continue as we had more children, but we still dabble in it from time to time. However, when we were aggressively working on it, I wrote down the questions, and made them so that they could be put into a Palm Pilot application.

If you would like to make use of what we have come up with, here are some files you can download:
A further explanation of how we use the questions: (Pdf)
A brief set of sample questions: (Pdf)
150 basic Old Testament questions: (Pdf)
All 600 quiz questions: (Pdf)


If you would like the quiz program for your PC or Palm it’s a little trickier. You need two things. First of all, you need the list of quiz questions, and then you need the quizzing program itself. Ideally, life would be simpler if you could have someone (like me) beam these to your Palm Pilot. If you do not know anyone that has the program, then you can get the two necessary files here.

1) The file of quiz questions you need is at http://www.premeditatedparenting.net/downloads/the_bible_challenge.pdb. Both the Palm and PC/Windows Quizzler programs use this same PDB file (Palm DataBase file) as a source for the questions.

2) From the Quizzler web site (www.quizzlerpro.com) you can download a free version of the quizzing program for your Palm Pilot, PC, or both.

To download Quizzler, click on one of the links below, or choose from the Quizzler download options (www.quizzlerpro.com/downloads.html).

* Palm OS (www.quizzlerpro.com/palm/Install_Quizzler.prc)
* Pocket PC (www.quizzlerpro.com/pocketpc/Quizzler_Setup.exe)
* PC/Windows (www.quizzlerpro.com/windows/QuizzlerSetup.exe)
* Mac (www.quizzlerpro.com/macintosh/Quizzler.zip)

For the palm you need to install Quizzler and “The Bible Challenge”. You’ll need to do a HotSync to get the files onto your Palm. Once you start Quizzler, select “The Bible Challenge” from the Quiz List page and then select “Quiz Options.” From the Quiz Options screen you can choose what chapter you’d like to be quizzed on. You should also set the ‘Sequence’ to ‘Random’ and the ‘Answers’ to ‘Multiple Choice’. Choose “Begin” to start the quiz.

For the PC you need to install Quizzler (from the PC-Windows option above) and copy the “The Bible Challenge” to your hard drive. Click on “File” and “Open Quiz PDB File…” to select “The Bible Challenge” as your quiz. From the Quiz Options screen you can choose what chapter you’d like to be quizzed on as well as some other less important choices. Choose “Begin” to start the quiz. Single click on answers. If you double click your first click will be read, a new question will start, and your second click will count as an attempted answer on the second question.