Life has enough temptations and challenges without creating another one. Being fat is a battle that need never be fought. Your baby deserves to be spared that battle.
Yesterday, as Mike pumped gas into our van, I watched the people come and go. Several children tumbled out of the car in front of me. One girl, about 8 years old, got out of the car and began a struggle of trying to pull the legs of her shorts down from where they had wedged in between the fat around her thighs. When that project was complete, she then began pulling on her underpants, bending and turning with the limited contortions she could make, until she had them in place. And then her blouse had to be pulled out because it was also twisted and stressed to the limit by the fat. The whole painful process took several minutes while I, as well as all those in the parking area, looked on. My heart went out to the poor little fat girl.
As the little girl struggled, circling around and around trying to reach places that were “miles away” simply because of the constraints of her size and the length of her arms, I couldn’t help but remember our dog when she was in labor. The poor dog, trying to get away from the pain and discomfort of labor, went around and around in a tight circle, struggling to get away from what binds her. I realized as I watched the little fat girl’s painful and pitiful maneuvering that this will be the story of her life, always struggling because of this terrible, discomforting burden of fat.
Most parents do not notice that their toddler has become fat, and if they did, most would not think that it mattered. But, by the time the child is 5 years old, and it becomes obvious that there is a problem, a pattern of eating and intemperance is well-established, and it is very difficult to correct. In many families, children under 5 or 6 years old are slim, but about the time they turn 7, they start adding on the pounds. These families, in an effort to excuse the problem, will explain that all their children did that because it is hereditary. I know heredity is responsible for various propensities, but heredity has no bearing on the self-image or the will with regards to temperance. I also know that a child learns to mimic those around him.
We fostered a handicapped child for 8 years. She ate what my two daughters ate and played with them. She wasn’t fat, but she was hippy around her thighs. Her biological mom and dad were really fat. I did everything in my power to help her stay thin, because I knew that one day I would not be able to carry her, and I would lose her to an institution. Even with all my efforts, as she began going through puberty, she continued to be somewhat hippy. I am telling you this because you need to know that I do understand both sides.
To allow a little child to get fat or even “pleasingly plump” is doing that child a grave injustice. As they grow up to adulthood, their health will never be as good as the normal-weight child; their confidence level will always be threatened; their chance of love could even be jeopardized; and they will have to work harder to earn other people’s respect—even other fat people’s respect. They will spend much money, time, and energy on fad diets. Their whole life will be consumed with the need to control their weight. They will waste a great portion of their life going around in circles, continually struggling to evade this cumbersome burden called, fat.
When I was a young mother, I had a friend who was fat. She watched over her children’s eating habits and play with the devotion of a saint. At the time, I thought her preoccupation seemed a little overboard. She almost appeared to be mean, but then I was young, dumb, and knew so little of the pain life can bring to a fat person. Now I understand that she was willing to appear mean for the sake of her children’s future health and happiness. Her children were always outside playing instead of sitting in front of the TV. When I called for popsicles for the kids, she gave it grave thought before saying yes or no. She told me over and over that her whole family was cursed with fat and poor health. Her husband’s family also had weight problems. She said that all her life, she struggled with her weight, and she would not pass the curse on to her children. She didn’t. It took me years to see how really wise and loving she was by being willing to exercise restraint for her children. Her children are now grown (slim and healthy) and very thankful for their mother’s persistent efforts.
Mothers usually buy the groceries. Controlling your children’s weight starts at the grocery store; no, it starts with your grocery list—or lack of one. Stop buying chips, candy, ice cream, cookies, and other junk foods. Learn to cook meals and sit down as a family to eat. I guarantee that if you do not allow them to eat junk between meals, and no promise of junk later, they will eat their meals, no matter what you serve. A snack between meals is fine, but it must be quality food. Study and find out what snacks are filling, healthful, and non-fattening. If you don’t have junk food in the house, they can’t beg for it, and you won’t have to say no. Keep fresh fruit in a basket ready to eat. In the refrigerator, you can keep a supply of washed and cut-up raw vegetables that the children can snack on any time they want. Eating raw pumpkin seeds helps keep them free of parasites. Raw nuts are a healthy snack. Keep a crock-pot full of beans warm and ready for an “anytime” fast, healthy meal.
An important motto is: Never take away anything without replacing it with something better. In other words, keep your children full on good foods so they don’t beg or sneak around to steal sweets or fatty foods. Many families reading this already have fat children who sneak around and steal food. Of course, the simple cure is to not have anything in the house that they are not free to eat all they want at any time.
One summer, we had several young girls (11 and 12 years old) come to stay for 3 weeks. Two of the girls were fat. I was shocked to find these two girls hiding in the pantry, opening cans and eating the nastiest stuff—like sweetened condensed milk and sausage rolls. They had learned to steal because they were addicted to overeating and to junk foods. Their habit of stealing food seems to cross over into general dishonesty. The verse, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth,” took on new meaning while the girls were in my home. No amount of reasoning or the ready supply of good food made any differences in their behavior. They knew that they would be in our home only a few more days, and they were not going to change their addiction for us. I hate to admit to you that I felt that I was a total failure in helping them.
Young families with small children simply do not realize how profound and far-reaching an eating problem can be for their child. By the time parents “wake up” and realize this is not just a problem with food, it is often too late to really make a difference. Their problem with food is really a problem with life. One day, parents suddenly become ashamed that their son is fat and lazy, and they decide to fix the problem. When they start battling with the 10-year-old, they finally realize that what they thought was just a weight problem is actually a character issue. Parents feel helpless and blame the child. The kid resents them and becomes more dishonest and belligerent. He grows up and spends his life struggling with, among other things, a lack of self-discipline, self-confidence, self-respect, defeatism, and endless, expensive health issues. What could have been nipped in the bud at 18 months of age, becomes a lifetime curse. Anyone excessively overweight will attest to the truth of what I am saying.
Young parent, for your child’s sake, stop the junk foods, turn the TV off, and take the child outside to romp and play. If you are overweight yourself, don’t pass the curse on with the excuse that it runs in the family. Never make excuses for something so serious. Always consider the situation to be what it is—life-threatening! Don’t end up wishing you had done something sooner. Make up your mind now while the child is a baby, and stick with your decision. If you buy right, you eat right. If you don’t want your child or yourself to eat a lot of it, don’t have it in the house.
Don’t abuse your children with sweet cereal and drinks. Give them the gift of self-discipline. Babies are born with no self-restraint yet have body given to fleshly desires. It is our duty as parents to restrain thier lust until their little soul grows to appreciate self control. Children too young to exercise self-discipline can be conditioned to be intemperate, to be addicted to lust, to live for their sugar and starch craving, to consume carbohydrates for the pure pleasure of the rush it gives them. It is like giving a child drugs until he is 12 years old and them telling him to stop. With the habit you instill, his will becomes enslaved and his temperance never develops. If you don’t stimulate a child’s lust by creating strong addictions to anything, it is much easier for them to develop self-control in a balanced environment. A child (adult as well) who is intemperate in one area will often be intemperate in general.
Give him the chance to have optimum health. Give her the freedom of not having to struggle with living a lie. Life has enough temptations and challenges without creating another one. Being fat is a battle that need never be fought. Your baby deserves to be spared that battle.

Debi Pearl

Two-year-old Johnny was sitting in his mother’s lap at the kitchen table. He reached for a dish of steamed squash, but his mother pulled him back and said "No." He twisted his shoulders back and forth as if to break her grasp, and then he defiantly slapped the table with the palm of his hand. His face expressed anger. He made grunting noises that were clearly designed to imitate an angry bear. He highly resented his mother limiting his powers of indulgence. He wanted to indulge his sense of touch, smell, taste, and sight, along with the human drive to manipulate. And finally, he wanted to indulge in controlling his environment and those in it. This mentality of ‘give it to me now’ has been developing since the day he was born. He has now had two years to accept it as a way of life. His parents are wondering if they should start training him to exercise self-control. However, they are two years overdue.
Parents are responsible to impart values and self-control to their children, but there is a dilemma. The infant has fully developed fleshly desires and habits of indulgence long before his mental faculties have developed to the level where he can understand the need to exercise self-control. When a child gets old enough to begin to develop a will to exercise self-control (possibly around three or four) his flesh is already well practiced in the dark arts of indulgence. His flesh will get a three or four year headstart on the development of his sense of duty. He is born with a wanter but no stopper – with a gas peddle but no brake. At age three or four he will already be a confirmed ‘pleasure junkie’, a ‘do as I please rebel’, an ‘if it feels good do it hippie’, a ‘nobody tells me what to do politician’, a spoiled brat. With intemperate habits already well formed, he is not going to appreciate the call of his newly developing conscience toward self-restraint. Nor will he appreciate anyone else trying to impose limitations on his addiction to indulgence.
In the extraordinary ignorance of modern psychology we are told that the child should be left to his own free expressions, that we must be careful not to suppress his personality. What will you do when his free expressions are antisocial, when his behavior is disgusting and embarrassing? Will you call it modern art, and appreciate it for its original departure from the prudent? To allow ‘free expression’ is to allow the child the freedom to be in bondage to appetite and carnal desire. We would no more allow a child the freedom to wander and explore the bounds of his drives and passions than we would allow him the freedom to wander in traffic. If you lovingly provide everything a child needs, but fail to cross his will with enforced boundaries, you will by default produce a self-centered, carnally minded, emotionally disturbed, and, at the best, an average member of the group hanging out at the mall.

Selfish Self-control
If parents don’t institute and enforce boundaries, the child will eventually develop some of his own. It happens by osmosis as he bumps into the boundaries that society erects for its own selfish ends. A man that wants to eat everything learns to control his drive until he gets out of the store. A man that wants to get drunk, yet wants to keep his job so as to have enough money to keep drinking, learns not to drink on the job. His self-interests will cause him to exercise the level of self-restraint necessary to continue functioning in a circle that ‘indulges and lets indulge’. Any self-control your child develops out of his contact with society is going to be for the purpose of advancing his indulgence with the least amount of friction.
It is universal to disguise one’s fleshly living as some form of self-restraint. This is possible because of that segment of society that has thrown off all restraint and indulges its flesh to the extreme. The radical fringe makes the vast majority of intemperate sinners look normal by comparison. The socially conscious majority are pragmatic enough to exercise sufficient self-restraint so as to maximize their indulgence without diminishing their mental pleasure in regard to their pride of life. In other words, the middle of the road sinner will learn to balance intemperance over against his desire to appear moral. His relative self-control is prompted by desires to both indulge and maintain a reputation that offers the most mental satisfaction. It is a juggling act of balancing one pleasure against another – the end always the same: self-gratification. This calculated and rationed self-restraint will never produce benevolence and godliness; it will produce sophisticated, culturally adapted hypocrites, who seek the fulfillment of animal drives while pretending a higher motive.
If you learn to function this way without hurting anyone other than a few people close to you, society will consider you mature and emotionally stable. You will succeed in life and will be considered a good "Christian." Wanting to appear righteous is not the same thing as wanting to be righteous. Sin has many roots and quite a few disguises. Jesus said, "You do indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but within you are full of dead men’s bones."
In our present age, a child has no hope unless his parents have the wisdom and courage to ignore modern psychology and the low expectations of the church as they train up the child in the way he should go. Basically a child needs two things: a stable secure environment of love and understanding, and boundaries consistently enforced by a dignified authority.
It is the parent’s responsibility to cause the child to exercise moderation and restraint. When a child is less than two years old, you cannot expect him to offer any assistance in constraining his appetites and drives. He will eat everything that tastes good, demand anything that appeals to him, expect to be the center of attention, and is unwilling to wait for any reason. Face the fact: no child is going to develop wholesome self-control naturally, and if you wait for him to get old enough to adopt the relative standards of society, you will find yourself fighting a battle against well entrenched depravity.
So how do we induce a child to practice self-control in the early years before he is mature enough to understand the need to do so? A small child learns self-control when his will is constrained by an outside force – in our case, that outside force is his parents. For the constraint to translate into soul training it must make use of the child’s will. If you tie a child’s hands behind his back, you have negated his ability to learn to control his hands. Likewise, if you place an object out of reach, the child cannot learn to restrain himself from reaching for it. Self-control is learned when self is controlling self. Pressure must be placed on the child’s will, not restraint on his body. The will of the child must be bracketed with constraints that cause him to choose to control his impulses.
You may ask how it is beneficial to constrain the child to choose the end we dictate if his choosing does not spring from his own values. Is the child building character if he chooses ‘A’ simply because we are there to make it very unpleasant for him to choose ‘B’, on which his lust is focused?
Here is the key, the reason behind early conditioning. We are constraining the volitional part of the child to control the appetite part. In other words, we are exercising the spirit and will of the child, causing the soulish self to exercise command over the fleshly self. Just as we move the limbs of a stroke victim in anticipation of the day when he will be able to move them, so we exercise the child’s will against the resistance of his fleshly drives, and this in anticipation of the day when his soul will be mature enough to value temperance. By causing the child to employ the mechanics of moral choice, he is denying his propensity to intemperance and is stunting the growth of his flesh, keeping it from gaining ascendancy over the soul. Thus, when the child is old enough to hold his own moral values, he will already possess a will that is accustomed to exercising control over the flesh, and he will already be comfortable with the idea that life is built around the concept of self-control and self-denial. By way of illustration, we are not waiting for him to become a confirmed alcoholic; we are causing him to refuse the first drink.
People control impulses to seek pleasure only when they deem it needful to do so. Adults can see the future and recognize the ill consequences of indiscriminate gratification, but a child can see only immediate pleasure or pain. His reason and conscience is worthless as a guide – powerless against the ever-present lust for pleasure. He knows no tomorrow, no day of judgment. If ill consequences do not come with the first bite or first touch, he does not consider the consequences. Don’t bother to tell him that too much candy will give him cavities or incline him to diabetes. Don’t bother to warn him that too much television will stunt his intellectual and social growth and diminish the quality of his life when he is grown. If it promises to feel good right now, he will do it. You are wasting your time to warn a little fat girl that she must exercise self-control in her eating lest she will produce more fat cells, thus inclining her to obesity when she is grown. It won’t even do any good to warn her that when she is older and wanting to impress the fellows that most of them will pass her by because she is fat. She just says, "Pass the mayonnaise and cheese dip." You are wasting the child’s time to tell her to wait because "patience is a virtue." She can’t eat virtue, and she thinks patients are in hospitals. "I want too eat now, so why shouldn’t I?"
Later on she may give up food because she values her sex appeal and social image more than eating, but she has just traded one indulgence for another. She has not learned self-control. She has learned to discriminate between the various roads to pleasure. Her soul still has but one end – self-gratification.
Self-control is not expressed in any one act; it is a condition of heart. It is the character to sacrifice any gratification, legitimate or otherwise, for the sake of divine principle. It is following the high road at the expense of any pleasure or comfort. The entire moral condition could be summed up in the concept of self-control. While we live in these bodies of flesh, the definition of righteousness is almost synonymous with self-control. If you have not trained the child to temperance by the time he is three or four years old, then you have allowed depravity to perfect itself.
So how do you cause a child to make a choice to deny his most pressing passions? If flesh is more fun, why would a child choose principle? He won’t unless you add some element that convinces him there is more immediate pleasure in principle than passion, or more immediate pain in passion than in principle.
The child cannot yet understand that which is obvious to a mature Christian, that lack of self-control is sin, and in the end sin brings misery and death. There is a sowing and reaping principle in place. "For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." (Galatians 6:8). Sin (lack of self-control) has negative consequences. Self-control (righteousness) has positive consequences. All intemperance, willfulness, lust, greed, self-seeking, and carnal indulgence is sin. Sin ends in death. The Bible testifies that in eternity sin will end in damnation. The consequence of sin may not come for 80 years – until judgment day, but it will come.
The child is incapable of understanding long range consequences – whether one year from now or eternity. Parents must modify the child’s environment to make the negative consequences immediately apparent to the child. This will require the fabrication of a rule of law based on real reward and punishment in the here-and-now. Parents must construct circumstances so as to give the child a true representation of reality. You cannot explain to a two-year-old that if he runs into the road he could be hurt, but you can apply a rod that causes him to feel the hurt when he crosses the sidewalk. You cannot tell a child that it is illegal to ride in a car unless in a restraining devise. He will not understand the cost of a ticket or the potential for harm, but he can well understand the harm to his backside if he does not immediately sit down, buckle up, and enjoy the ride.
Keep in mind, the younger the child is the less he is able to retain in his memory the association between the act and the consequences. The smaller a child is the more he lives in the present only. That is why so many parents have found their spankings so ineffective when they remove the child from the scene of the transgression to administer discipline. By the time the child has been led into the bedroom, he has forgotten the transgression. He associates the spanking with the bedroom, not the deed done in the living room. The same loss of association occurs when you delay spanking to grill the child with long lectures. He forgets the transgression and thinks he is getting a spanking for being bored with the speech. It is much more effective to keep several rods handy – one in every room – and be ready to administer one or two licks within seconds of the transgression. You don’t need to make a lengthy ritual out of it. Some parents try to turn discipline into a revival meeting, complete with altar calls.
Likewise if you are not consistent, and you allow the child to occasionally get away with his lack of self-control, you are allowing a seed of dark hope to grow in his imagination. It doesn’t matter that you spank him five consecutive times for the same offense; if you fail to spank him the sixth time he commits the offense, he will keep violating the rule, bearing the pain, hoping for the exception to roll around again.
You need to compare the child’s desire to indulge to the desire of an alcoholic. It is not rational. It is idiotic. Just the smell of indulgence will drive a child to absurd lengths. If every time an alcoholic took a drink, the alcohol produced an immediate hangover, once the drunk convinced himself that the pattern would never change, he would cease to drink. He drinks because there is immediate pleasure in it. Children abandon themselves to uncontrolled indulgence because it is immediately pleasurable, and they care not for the next hour, much less for the rest of their lives.
Parenting is being on the spot to bring discipline to every area of a child’s life. If the child is to grow morally, we must arrange the consequences so that the child is always rewarded for the proper behavior and suffers for the negative. Make all negative behavior counterproductive and all positive behavior productive. Thwart any attempt of the child to act without restraint, by artificially constructing negative consequences. The rod is the ultimate negative consequence.
But don’t depend on the rod alone. In reality, the rod is not sufficient by itself. Training is much broader, and in most cases can achieve the desired end very effectively long before you must resort to the rod. If you can consistently deny a child the indulgence he desires, you need not spank. The bottom line is not that the child be spanked, but that the proposed infraction is thwarted to the point of being unpleasant.

A little knuckle-head came to visit me the other day. I call him knuckle-head because he is the type that makes people want to give him a rap on the head with their knuckles. He hadn’t been in the house two minutes when he spied my glasses lying on the table. Now I admit I should not have left my glasses lying around, but it turned out to be a great “Garden of Eden” test for the little rascal. He immediately picked up a small rod and started lightly whacking the glasses. I loved it.

His daddy is a fine man that got saved while incarcerated in the prison where Mike ministers. His daddy has become well founded in the Word. Now that he is out of prison, he has had to get to know his son all over again and learn to be a parent.

I could see right off that Knuckle-head needed a cheerful training session (and the Daddy as well). First I looked in the daddy's eyes and asked, “May I play mama for a few minutes?” Since he had no clue what to do, he gave me the go ahead. I miss having little ones and take every chance I get. I then went to the little rascal and, smiling, I leaned across the table and took the whacking stick from him. He gave me a full-toothed grin with the only remaining front tooth. He is six years old, you understand.

I couldn’t help but adore the little guy; no doubt he depended upon that. But my brains are bigger than my heart, so I whacked him once across the offending hand with his whacking stick, while telling him in a pleasant voice not to bother the glasses. Never losing eye contact, I could tell he seemed to think he had run into a knuckle-head bigger and more interesting than he. I laid the whacker back down beside my glasses and with one last smile walked toward the kitchen. I only got a few steps when he again whacked my glasses. “Haw, haw,” I said with a twinkle in my eye, “You are not supposed to touch my glasses.” Before he had time to lay the offending tool aside, I had grabbed it up and delivered my next (much less gentle this time) whack.

Now, if the whack had been delivered in a stressful attitude he would have been emotionally and physically wounded. If he had been dragged from the room and given time to become hysterical, all training would have been obscured by the trauma. His little brain can only decipher so much info at one time, and the emotional trauma of being taken into a strange room by a stern adult would make anyone’s brain short circuit. Instead, he remained at the scene of his offense, getting smacked by the very implement he had used to commit the offense—and this without any anger or emotional rejection. I could clearly see it was a new experience in the little rascal’s life.

When I laid the whacker down by the glasses, he first stared at it for ten seconds then at me a few moments before jumping up to see what else there was to explore. For the next hour he checked out everything, but when in doubt he would look over to me for the go-ahead. If I smiled, he charged on; if I shook my head, he smiled and backed off. I know his next visit will bring another chance to reaffirm my position as head-honcho, but after a few such encounters he will know what I expect of him, and he will have a keen appreciation for my methods. You would think the little fellow would be so glad to be free of the house where the whacking lady rules, but not so. On his way out the door he was begging his dad to bring him back real soon.

Most parents rear their children by some such method as: “Pretend to not see; it doesn’t matter; I can take this kind of behavior; remove the thing that tempts the kids; give the children what they desire, etc.” But when the parents reach sufficient frustration they begin loathing the child and their attitude becomes one of “I can't stand it any longer!” Then the default method clicks in—it’s called ANGER. “This kid is a brat; he has done the unthinkable, and I’m going to teach him he can’t get away with it!” If you start off ignoring the problem, the only thing that will go away is your patience.

Now, most parents seeing a six-year-old destroying a pair of glasses will immediately be angry and respond to the child something like: "What do you think you’re doing?" or, "Don’t touch those glasses!" Parents then put the glasses in a safe place, and the kid goes on to find some other way of testing adult resolve. When a further transgression manages to elicit a similar response from the big guys, the child looks somewhat crestfallen before going on to the next test of parental attention. By this time, Mrs. Mom or Mr. Dad is sufficiently stressed to begin showing extreme displeasure in the child. In this way, mom and dad cut strings of fellowship rather than build camaraderie. So the 'mistraining' process goes around again and again.

Parents convince themselves that the longer they can tolerate the child's misbehavior, the more they express love. Parents fear themselves. They have discovered from past experiences that their tempers are detrimental to the children. Parents waiting until anger provokes them to rebuke the children have seen only ill effects from rebuke and chastisement. They have come to accept the concept that rebuke and chastening is a negative event that must be avoided as long as possible. Parents are aware that their frustrated, and sometimes angry, correction does not work good in the temperament of their children. Confrontation brings hostility on the part of the children as well as the parents. Therefore, parents feel that the more they can tolerate and the longer they can ignore it, the better.

Parents influenced by modern psychology (that is anyone in America exposed to any media or education, including most that is called Christian) take pride in their ability to absorb a vast amount of frustration without letting it boil over into overt hostility. They think they demonstrate their emotional maturity and their love and kindness by sublimating their anger and letting the “little darlings express themselves.”

Face the fact: your child’s goal is to be self-indulging without regard to the rule of law or the needs of others. Children are good psychologists. They quickly learn how to manipulate their parents into permissiveness. They learn that if they can make the act of discipline sufficiently unpleasant on parents, and give the appearance of it being even more unpleasant on them, then parents will back off. For they know two things: One, parents do not want to experience the unpleasantness of conflict; Two, parents do not want to make life unpleasant for their children. Knowing this, they see to it that discipline becomes painful for everyone. Furthermore, knowing that your goal in discipline is to make them cheerfully obedient, all they have to do is make your efforts a failure, and for practical reasons you will cease your interference and seek a more conciliatory approach—one in which there is compromise—allowing the child equal say in his own expressions.

Parents get so involved in their own feelings, whether of anger or compassion, that they forget the good of the children. Then some parents are so short-sighted that they can see no further than the moment. They settle for immediate peace, and the children set the terms for peace. What you must understand is that your children need something very badly that they do not want and will not learn unless you train it into them—self-denial. “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame (Prov. 29:15).” Children allowed free expression turn out worse than a cat allowed free expression in the house.

Going back to our example, Knuckle-head had been allowed self-expression; he had not been taught self-denial. A child proficient at exerting his own will is not ready to yield his autonomy without a fight. He will push you beyond your limit to maintain control of his own life. It is not you personally, nor is it the thing over which there is a contest (in this case the glasses); it is the issue of independence, freedom to live without law—capriciously, selfishly. Only when you have allowed a dispensation wherein you have become subservient to the child’s will do you as an adult, a parent, become angry and testy. When you know that you ought to have control, but don’t, and you do not know what to do to remedy the situation, the frustration will lead to anger and hostility. Parent, know that from that perspective you will never win. The child will remain in control and never respect your authority until you respect yourself and your position enough to act forcefully and consistently without anger or vacillation.

Children will fight authority, but once you force it upon them, they will be happier than they have ever been. Great peace and security comes to a child who is put under benevolent authority. They very quickly love the adult that forces them into compliance with their own conscience. Like Paul in Romans chapter 7, children will impulsively do what they know they should not do, all the while fighting to maintain their rebellion, yet crying out for deliverance. As the law and the cross applied in love subdues the sinner so the rod and reproof administered in love will give wisdom to the child (Prov. 29:15).

- Michael Pearl

I do have a question. How do I deal with an angry child? When he doesn't get his way, when I fix a breakfast he's not fond of, he acts angry and blames me. He often tells me that spankings only makes him angrier. What am I missing? CH

There is only one reason that he would express anger when he did not get his way; because such displays have, at least occasionally, caused him to get his way. He is manipulating you. The fact that he continues to do it tells me that it occasionally works. You give in. You have successfully trained him to respond as he does.
You feel guilty and inadequate, and he knows it. He knows you are trying to work the anger out of him, so he assures you that your responses only make matters worse. You believe him, so he wins again. Smart kid.
The big problem is that he is a little fish in a very little bowl. He is learning to respond to life in a manner that will not work later in life. He controls his weak mother, but the world is not made up of weak mothers. There are some “couldn’t care less” people waiting out there who can also get angry and act quite irrational. Cops are trained to deal with angry boys, even 250 pounders.
I regularly go to a prison that has over 1200 men in it. Many of them were just like your son when they were his age. No one could control them, that is, until they met a don’t-care cellmate and a don’t-give-a-blankety-blank security guard, surrounded by several razor wire fences. If you don’t like the food, and few do, you don’t have to eat it. No one will feel guilty when you go hungry. If you get angry and they throw you in solitary, they are not impressed if you say, “That only makes me angrier.” Such talk won’t even interrupt the discussion the security guards are having as they escort you to the cell in your cute little white jacket with your arms tied behind you. One minute out of the cell, they won’t remember your angry threat.
Funny thing, 1200 men will go all week without one fight. If you get angry at the wrong person in a prison, you may die with a sharpened toothbrush sticking in your throat. Angry little boys never say, “Don’t do that, it only makes me more angry.” Who cares? When no one is listening and no one is impressed, threats are useless.
I am not calloused to your dilemma. But the big problem is in your own mind. You are not free to be forceful and bold. Your son needs to run smack dab into a big, high, unmoving fence of authority. You, mother, are a pushover, a sucker. Your need is a renewed mind. Now that I have plowed your fallow ground, I will plant the seeds of understanding.
Let’s try to understand this anger. Displeasure when one doesn’t get his way is as natural as humanity. If one were not disappointed by unfulfilled drives, he would be without preference and thus without personhood. Anger is also a natural trait of all living souls—not necessarily of the fallen state only. God is angry when it is appropriate. Speaking of Jesus, the Scripture says, “And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts... (Mark 3:5).”
Righteous anger is anger directed at injustice, selfishness. To be righteously angry toward someone is to impute blame to them. It is to hold them in contempt for not acting as they should have. Righteous anger seeks goodness. It is the guardian of love. It is moral choice expressed in the emotions.
Righteous anger is agreeing with the innate dictates of common law. It is taking your place on the jury to condemn and then recommend sentencing to the guilty.
But anger at not getting one’s way is something else entirely. Selfish anger is manipulative and unreasonable. It assumes that ultimate good is the gratification of self. It judges all events according to how they personally gratify. To thus be angry toward others, the individual must assume that others exist to fulfill his impulses. To him, right and wrong is: everyone does good by complying with my will and everyone does evil by depriving me of what I want. His anger is judgment falling on the ‘sinner’ for standing in the way of his indulgence. The selfishly angry person is judge and jury in a courtroom where the only rule of law is the satisfaction of one person—self. All should be subservient to the big I, or all should be damned. A selfishly angry person lives at the center of a small world with all others orbiting for his gratification. He is the manager of affairs according to his whims. The needs of others or the justice of a situation is irrelevant.
Mother, I am trying to make you angry—not hurt, not guilty, and certainly not timid. The Devil is running away with your child. You can stop it. You can break the spell. For this angry perversion to survive it must be fed. Shake off the senseless guilt and stand firm and consistent in not yielding to you son’s demands. When you see that ugly head of self-centeredness pop up in your son, cut it off like you would a venomous viper in your baby’s crib. To give over to his demands, even once, is like a mother giving drugs or alcohol to her addicted child. Addictions are not broken a little at a time. They are starved to death. Shake him out of his make-believe, selfish kingdom. Kick him off the throne and never look back.
Now that I have emphasized the seriousness of this I will offer some practical advise. Cause you son to know that he does not have any say or authority over what foods are set in front of him. You do this by never allowing him to veto your decisions once they are made. If you want to offer him a choice before you prepare the meal, that is gracious of you and perfectly suitable, but never allow him to direct events with anger or ill temper. You must not be angry. No not plead for understanding or acceptance in your role as head dietician. Display indifference with dignity. Rise above petty debate and bickering. Like an army Sargent, state your will and accept nothing less. If he doesn’t like what is on the table and he is rude, send him away from the table and do not let him eat until the next meal. Do not feed him snacks between meals, and let him get good and hungry. He will then eat baby food spinach and love it. If you think it is appropriate and you spank him make sure that it is not a token spanking. Light, swatting spankings, done in anger without courtroom dignity will make children mad because they sense that they have been bullied by an antagonists. A proper spanking leaves children without breath to complain. If he should tell you that the spanking makes him madder, spank him again. If he is still mad.... He desperately needs an unswayable authority, a cold rock of justice. Keep in mind that if you are angry you are wasting your time trying to spank his anger away.
I could break his anger in two days. He would be too scared to get angry. On the third day he would draw into a quiet shell and obey. On the fourth day I would treat him with respect and he would respond in kind. On the fifth day the fear would go away and he would relax because he would have judged that as long as he responds correctly there is nothing to fear. On the sixth day he would like himself better and enjoy his new relationship to authority. On the seventh day I would fellowship with him in some activity that he enjoyed. On the eight day he would love me and would make a commitment to always please me because he valued my approval and fellowship. On the ninth day someone would comment that I had the most cheerful and obedient boy that they had ever seen. On the tenth day we would be the best of buddies.