Disciplining Is to Editing as Parenting Is to Writing

Though comparing editing to disciplining is Mr. Hyde strange, last week it dawned on me that I have a comparatively equal amount of experience with both. About the time I learned that readers get rather annoyed when philosophical tangents interrupt their fictional pastimes, I discovered that two-year-olds will fail to brush their teeth properly without parental intervention. About the time I learned that using dialogue helps my much-appreciated readers endure my eureka flow of ideas, I discovered that red food coloring in candy releases the insanity stored in my child's tongue muscles. And about the time I learned that my child will hardly perform at a collegiate level in kindergarten, I learned that my early-writing vocabulary was severely flat and had ample room for improvement.

Though you would think it hard to believe if I told you the amount of time I have spent scolding my child, I hated hated hated disciplining when it came time to spank him. I hated that rod of discipline! Every time that consequence slipped from my frustrated lips, I felt guilty. Though now that we are years into our parenting experiment, that guilt has somewhat subsided, mostly due to my wife and me having sat down with our son and deciding on a discipline program, but my hatred of spanking still lingers. Nevertheless, we have designed and amended our discipline program as our son has aged, and I have found our method incredibly effective at molding our child's behavior. This progress is thrilling to see, but as I lay out my suggestions below for you to consider, keep a certain splash of reality nearby because I am completely human and completely capable of slipping on the banana peels even today as I execute these disciplining ideals.

Keep the Point in Focus

To get disciplining right, keep the point in focus. Disciplining is different than punishment. Punishment, though a specialized tool within the grounds of disciplining, is or should be the consequence received for aberrant behavior while disciplining is the selected method of deriving desirable behavior. There's a difference. Any person, at any age I might add, can sit down and agree on what good behavior is and should look like. Hence, by sitting down and agreeing what is acceptable and desirable, both parent and child can agree on their train's final stop. I have a great mentor at work that has termed this concept getting buy-in. (My mentor and I are instructors and deal with teaching and enforcing certain behaviors every time we set foot in our classrooms.) This extraneous info aside, getting buy-in focuses on convincing the student of the why, and by conveying the why before correcting an aberrant behavior, the student usually offers much less resistance to the required change demanded by the teacher, i.e. the parent in our case. Again, to get disciplining right, both teacher and student, or parent and child, need to have the point of discipling in focus, and this task is more easily accomplished when the student buys into the why. (It also holsters the firearm for the parent, forcing them to review and revise weak and superfluous rules—rules that could be the very impetus of frustration and rebellion.)

Providing the why is repeatedly exemplified in the Bible:

• Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.— Exodus 20:12 (KJV)

• Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth. — Deuteronomy 6:14-15 (KJV)

• Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue: And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring: That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God. — Numbers 15:38-40 (KJV)

• And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. — Leviticus 17:10-11 (KJV)

• And Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men, and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law: And that their children, which have not known any thing, may hear, and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as ye live in the land whither ye go over Jordan to possess it. — Deuteronomy 31:10-13 (KJV)

I'm sure it would take years to exhaustively list all the Bible’s examples in this manner.

Though it's not a hard and fast rule, providing your child with a legitimate reason while disciplining them is a Biblical pattern that's like a cardinal in the winter snow: pleasantly welcome and easy to spot.

Be Calm, Cool, and Consistent

To get disciplining right, be calm, cool, and consistent. Yes, being collected is the cliché, but consistency is more important than a third synonym here. To make my case, how about a personal case study? As a college adult, I took up the call to be a middle-school leader at a church in Daytona Beach, Florida. I should rephrase: as a college adult, I took up the challenge to be a middle-school leader at a church in Daytona Beach, Florida. It was a small church that my father and I had discovered as he dropped me off for my freshman year at my out-of-state university. The church had an auditorium, sanctuary if you rather, connected to a long hallway of classrooms, and the classroom at the far end of this hallway was a dual-purpose room, being both an office, Pastor Saul's office, and the middle-school meeting room. Poor Pastor Saul. I can attest that my middle-school students put their feet on every inch of that room: floor, walls, chairs, and bookshelves. I remember one rainy morning during a lesson on loving others, after a firm warning that the next student to throw a piece of paper across the room would be sent to stand alone outside in the hallway, Adam, the blond, blue-eyed class clown, forgetfully wadded up a piece of paper and tossed it at Tianna. Then all the eyes in the classroom swiveled from looking at Adam to looking at me. I will also attest that once Adam was standing in the hallway alone, the other rowdy students arrived promptly at their destination of Good Behavior, as did Adam on subsequent gatherings. If there was one thing I learned, other than that middle-school students have strong magnets in their bones and mischief up their sleeves, it was that they want rules and consequences. Let that sink in because it's true: rules AND consequences. I taught anywhere between five to fifteen middle-school students for an hour at a time two times a week and learned that the moment the rules were broken a consequence was expected and that if a consequence went astray, chaos would ensue. Also, chaos would quickly ensue if I became frustrated, flustered, or distracted. Let this sink in too. My credibility was as important at keeping order as my consistency in delivering consequences was. If I had to metaphorically summarize these two lessons that I learned from these spunky kids, I would say: Be a turtle and keep crossing the road in the rainstorm. If you do, you’ll not only survive the rain, but the grass will be greener at the end of your parenting hour.

Expect Imperfection

Lastly, to get disciplining right, expect imperfection. How many times did it take for your child to learn to walk? To read? Or to hit a baseball? More than once...more than likely. I already emphasized consistency, but also, communicating to your child that you believe in them, period, no matter what, and that you can prophetically see them being successful, is a psychological boon. In other words, never give up. Always offer encouragement, and if punishment becomes required to correct a setback in behavior, follow it up with words of confidence, however difficult to deliver, that share your vision of their future. To this end, I humbly also submit that if a harsh discipline is required, set a time and a place for it to happen. Doing so will disconnect you physically and emotionally from your own frustrations, allowing you to be the best turtle you can be, and it will give your child time to suffer...from anticipation—and we can all recall a time when anticipation of the punishment was worse than the punishment itself, can't we? If you succeed in following through, I am certain you will discover as I did that the aberrant uprising is thwarted and responsible government reigns once more.

As I read through 1 Thessalonians, especially the last chapter, I can envision a parent who is exhorting their child. And essentially that is the context: YHWH is our heavenly father. Paul writes: "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it." 1 Thess 5:23-24 (KJV)

What About Editing?

If you read this post expecting to get tips on editing, the same concepts conveniently apply.

Keep the point in focus. If passages or parts of your manuscript depart or detract from the topic, cut, splice, and revise them out to keep the momentum of the piece going.

Be calm, cool, and consistent. If you are editing in a maverick, distracted manner, you will make editing-editing errors, I guarantee it. Along the same lines, locally editing can cause a domino effect when it comes to ensuring a varied, smooth flow of words and ideas for the reader to appreciate. Setting a time and place for an undistracted read-through is the most valuable final edit you can perform to improve your piece of literature, hands down.

Expect imperfection. If you expect perfection, especially on the front end of writing, one of two things will happen. Either you will enter a cruel, endless editing cycle, or you will preemptively scatter your script around the internet before it’s truly ready to be enjoyed. Still, never give up, and if you need some encouragement, try digging out an old version of your script and read how much your writing has improved after your iterations of editing.

Likewise, full-circle, if you need encouragement in your eighteen-year trek through the thunderstorm of parenthood, look back at an old scrap book and see how far your squalling child has matured.

Keep disciplining (like a turtle)

JH

Photo by David Cadenas on Unsplash