True home-discipline repudiates the legal idea of punishment as much as of impunity.  It lies in a medium between these, and involves the idea of Christian correction or chastisement.  We should correct, but not punish our children.  Correction is not the mere execution of legal penalties as such, but the fruit of Christian love and concern for the child.  It does not mean simple corporeal chastisement, but moral restraints.  The impunity is the fruit of love without law; the corporeal punishment is the execution of law without love; Christian correction is the interposition of love acting according to law in restraining the child.  Hence, true discipline is the correction of the child by the love of the parent, according to the laws of home-government.

Abraham instituted in his household a model system of home-discipline.  “I know him,” says God, “that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the ways of the Lord to do justice and judgment.”  He was not a tyrant; his comrades did not bear the rough sternness of a despot, neither did his power wear the scowl of vengeance.  But these bore the firmness and decision of love tempered and directed by the law of Christian duty and responsibility.  They showed his station as a father; they wore the exponent of his authority as a parent, whose love was a safeguard against tyranny on the one hand, and whose accountability to God was a security against anarchy, on the other.  Hence, his children respected his station, venerated his name, appreciated his love, confided in his sympathy, and yielded a voluntary obedience to his commands; for they discerned in them the blessing; and when offenses came, they bent in the spirit of loving submission and pupilage, under his rod of correction, and kissed it as the means of their reformation and culture.

Thus does home-discipline involve the firmness of parental authority united with the mildness of parental love.  Love should hold the reins and use the rod.  Then it will purify and elevate natural affection, and develop in the child a sense of proper fear, without either disrespectful familiarity or mechanical servitude.

The efficiency of home-discipline depends upon its early introduction, upon the decision with which it is administered, upon its adaptation to the real wants of the child, and upon the manner in which it is applied.

It should be commenced in due season, as soon as the child can understand its meaning and object.  The child should be made to understand that he lives under authority and restraint.  This will prepare him for a profitable correction when necessary.  The great fault of many parents is that they begin too late to correct their children, and leave them until then in ignorance of its nature and intent.  Hence, the child will not appreciate the parent’s motive, and will lack that pliability of spirit which is essential to reformation.  “The sceptre,” says James, in his Family Monitor, “should be seen by him before the rod; and an early, judicious and steady exhibition of the former, would render the latter almost unnecessary.  He must be made to submit, and that while young, and then submission will become a habit; the reins must be felt by him early, and he will thus learn to obey them.”