If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.
Interpretation
Disciplining children now can prevent future emotional pain.
This quote by Charles Spurgeon suggests that while correcting and guiding children might cause temporary discomfort or headaches for parents, it is essential for their development. If parents avoid disciplining their children, they may face much greater emotional pain or heartaches later when those children grow up without the necessary values and guidance.
In practice
During a parenting seminar discussing the importance of boundaries.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
Society should see parenting as a public health issue and help parents to bring their children up feeling loved. We have birthing classes, but no parenting classes. The latter is desperately needed if we are to avoid self-destruction.
Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.
My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
Never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's.
The first duty to children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that.
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