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Something we discovered when we had twins is the concept of “bulk effect.” Our OB told us in advance that having twins (we already had two at the time) was not going to make us twice as busy, but rather exponentially busier, and he was right.

Let’s say that you are trying to get ready for church, and one child is disobedient (something petty, like not putting on their shoes when you told them to). They wandered off and got distracted and loitered in the living room for a minute. In that minute the baby starts crying, you see the clock and realize that you are going to be late, you can’t find the wet wipes or the baby’s shoe, which you know you put on the table last night. The baby is still screaming, so you are trying to rock the seat with your foot while doing the hair of your middle child, who will not stop bouncing. You are shouting out at to your husband to see if he knows what happened to the baby shoe, probably punctuated with, “Sit still. Stop. Don’t wiggle.” As it turns out, your husband is out looking for someone’s lost shoe in the car where they are prone to remove them, so you get no response. You begin to have evil thoughts about shoes. You start feeling the pressure, if you know what I mean. The tension is mounting. You may very well be feeling hot and sweaty while you coffee is getting cold on the counter, untouched. At this moment, the child who didn’t put his shoes on comes wandering back, refreshed with a nice spell of magna-doodling. What do you think happens?

You take the shred of guilt and then harness onto it the stress of the whole situation. You make your child the scapegoat, a way for you to release all your tension and stress onto someone who you feel deserved it. He did, after all, disobey. Your massive overreaction was just, because disobeying is wrong. So this neat little trick is happening in your head—-the consequences for his sin go way up, and the consequences for yours go way down. It is simply a classic shifting of the blame. The situation is crazy, but you are the person responsible to get the grace to deal with it.

Oftentimes you won’t even discipline the sin that did occur, because you are wanting to leave this situation with the feeling that you were full of grace toward that child who maliciously magna-doodled. Next time, you say, you will get spankings. This time, you will just have to bear the weight of my discontent, my anger, and my lack of self-control. I will vent on you instead of dealing with myself. So let that be a lesson to you.

If you took the actions of each individual child, nothing big happened. One kid took her shoes off last night in the car. One kid keeps bouncing when you are trying to fix her hair, one kid had a dirty diaper, one kid magna-doodled instead of putting on shoes, and the baby just wants some attention. And of course the disobeying is wrong. The combined effect is certainly ripe, especially when you add in the things that Mom and Dad were responsible for. The time. The lost clothing that could have been found last night. Not noticing the distracted disobedience right away. Not getting up early enough to drink your coffee. Not getting grace to deal with it as soon as it starts heating up.

The situation is not a sin. It is merely the combined effect of a lot of people. And just because you can pin down one sin in the batch does not mean that child is responsible for the situation. Your children are not a situation. They are individuals. Disciplining an individual for a collective situation is a great way to alienate your children. It is not only unjust and unkind, but it is untrue to the gospel. Christ takes our sins; he does not load us down with someone else’s. He sees what we have done and takes it from us and bears it with him to the cross. What you just did was toss your burden of guilt onto a child to have her carry it. Well, what is she supposed to do with it, other than be beaten down by it?

Individually, there is nothing to worry about. But the “bulk effect” is when it feels as though we are careening toward destruction. You will need to see it happening and get the grace for it in advance.

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