A week ago Saturday night over 200 teenagers created three hours of havoc in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. According to newspaper reports, “Mobs of teenagers roved the streets…beat a man unconscious, broke windows, threw rocks at moving cars, looted a store, threatened a police officer and mugged anyone who dared to get in their way.”
Everyone is asking, “What got into those kids? What motivated the mob violence? Do we need to invest more public funds in downtown? Are the kids retaliating to earlier killing of a teenager on a public transit bus? What’s the problem?”
When I read about the rebellious teens I recalled a very unpleasant experience I had on a flight from Orlando to Atlanta recently. A defiant, screaming two-year old child made everyone in my section of the plane absolutely miserable. I can understand little babies crying when the change of air pressure hurts their ears. I can understand a two year old getting restless on a long flight. I can be sympathetic when a child with learning disabilities is difficult to calm down. Kids will be kids. But believe me, this was not that.
This, healthy, two-year-old boy was repeatedly screaming as loud as he could even before we taxied from the gate. His mother tried to persuade him to sit down and fasten his seat belt but he kept screaming, “No! No! No!” When she tried to force him to sit down he threw a temper-tantrum and kicked both his mother and the seat in front of him.
As the plane taxied toward the runway, the frustrated mom cuddled the child in her arms and rocked him trying to make him feel secure. Then she tried again to persuade him to sit in his own seat but he again screeched at the top of his lungs, “No! No! I wont!” Finally she managed to muscle the howling child to a semi-seated position and fasten his seat belt while the plane took off. But the mutinous child kept kicking the seat in front of him and yelling at his mother. The man in front of this kid had to be a saint.
Almost the entire flight this unruly child kept letting out bloodcurdling screams and defying his mother’s requests to be still. She tried to entertain him with a toy and he just shoved it aside. She offered him something to drink but he wanted none of it.
I was sitting by a man I learned was a doctor from India and after an hour I asked, “Doctor, you aren’t an anesthesiologist are you?” We both laughed but it was so frustrating to everyone on that flight to endure that kind of torture, all because a mother did not know how to discipline her child.
When the plane arrived at the gate and the flight attendant announced, “Welcome to Atlanta!”, I think everyone in my section muttered, “Praise, God!” and prepared to exit as quickly as possible.
We were all angry and frustrated, not with the child but with the mother. I wished I had Dr. James Dobson’s book about raising strong-willed children to give her because she’s in for much misery. And it’s going to be very difficult for that child to ever have a submissive spirit toward God – or any authority for that matter.
The Bible teaches that every child is born with a sin nature. David wrote, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5) No matter how compliant or cute, every child is born with a rebellious nature.
It’s the first assignment of the parent to teach respect for authority. Liberal thinkers who equate spanking with violence, insist that children are basically good and if given enough love and opportunity will eventually choose the right thing. But they ignore the fact that while there is good in every child, evil dominates the human heart. Jeremiah said, ‘the heart is deceitful and beyond cure.” (Jer. 17:9)
Children cannot be left to their own desires or they will become increasingly selfish and defiant. That’s why Solomon instructed parents, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” (Prov. 22:6) That training begins when toddlers are just learning to crawl. When the ten-month-old is told, “No! Don’t touch!” and he reaches out and touches the object anyway, the wise, loving parent smacks the back of the child’s hand enough to sting.
Child abuse is horrible. It’s never right to physically harm a child. But child neglect has horrible consequences too. It’s the parent’s job to teach that disobedience brings pain and obedience brings blessing. A smack on the back of the hand is not abuse, it’s teaching respect for authority much more effectively than a jail sentence will teach a 16 year old delinquent that he can’t beat up people at random.
If the discipline starts in the crawling stage, the two-year-old is more likely to be submissive when the mother tells him to sit down on the plane. But if he resists and screams, a wise mother will pinch a nerve on the back of the child’s neck enough to instill hurt commensurate with the pain he’s causing others around him. If he still refuses to listen, a biblically trained mother would pick the child up, take him to the plane’s restroom, take his pants down and smack his bottom end – a place where God provided enough padding to protect but also enough sensitive nerves to experience sufficient pain. Proverbs 22:15 reads, “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.”
After he’s finished crying from the spanking, the wise mother asks, “Are you ready to go back and be obedient?” When he sniffles and nods, she brings the humbled child back out and every reasonable person around her appreciates what she has done. And one day that child will rise up and call her blessed.
The source of the mob violence in downtown Louisville that Saturday night was not a stabbing on a public transit bus or a negligent police department. We are reaping the harvest of broken marriages and the lack of proper discipline in the home. We have sown the wind of permissiveness and are reaping the whirlwind of chaos.
Robert Winthrop, Speaker of the U.S House of Representatives in the mid 1800s said it well, “All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they may have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.”
Since we’ve rejected the Biblical instruction about teaching children to respect parental authority, it’s not surprising that the public is calling on authorities to beef up police presence in downtown Louisville.
