Dr. Dobson summarizes discipline like this:

At a football game when a guy jumps off sides, what does the referee do? He doesn’t get red-faced and begin screaming about the virtues of keeping the rule. He drops the flag and he steps off the penalty.

In the same way, when your child messes up, don’t break the peace of your home. Step off the penalty — and do it consistently. Don’t reason with the little guy. Discipline him.

If you withhold discipline from your child, you may regret your choice when he hits his preteen years and decides he just doesn’t want to listen to you anymore. When there are no painful consequences to disobedience, children find it much easier to tune out their parents.

Many times, we as Christian parents think disciplining our children simply means that we don't allow our kids to do or watch certain things. There’s a place for prohibition. But that is not the core of discipline; rather, it's to find a way to help the child experience negative consequences proportionate to his bad behavior. And the goal is not to control or break the will. The goal is to build within our children a wise, internal standard that will guide them when they have to make moral choices on their own.