The story of two parenting styles—I love you BUT and I love you AND—is, I suspect* the story behind why many parents are so uncomfortable disciplining their children—so very, very uncomfortable that they keep on using empathetic discipline even when it isn’t working. Even when it’s making them and their kids unhappy.
Because yes, I’ve seen this. I’ve seen kids who are made unhappy by empathetic discipline—some of them are my own. And part of it comes down to the fact that empathy—while precious and critical in the right time and place—can confuse a lot of kids when they hear it more loudly than they hear the “no” which is also critical in its time and place.
But the other reason that empathetic discipline can fail—and I’m convinced this is the problem a lot of the time—is that the parent is, like many an authoritarian parent, mired in the idea that love and discipline are somehow opposites.
We don’t like this in theology, do we? Isn’t the whole problem of theodicy, at bottom, the problem of understanding how God can let bad stuff happen to me? How can God love me and discipline me at the same time? The Old Testament says something about “whom God loves he chastises”; it is one of those lines that tends to make us squirm.
* I have no data to prove this. This goes into the category of “sociological questions I would like to study someday.”
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