Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. Proverbs 22.6
What does it mean to train up a child? It begins with acknowledging that children do not possess the skills, experience, and discipline required for the next stage of their lives, and an intentional and structured approach is required to deploy these in order to prepare them for an unknown and uncertain future. I would like to suggest that just because your child lives under your roof does not imply that you might train them. Discipline and deploying certain skills and experience is an active processes. Many parents assume the church and schools are training their children and choose to take no active role in their children’s development. Others assume providing the tuition for a great education or handing over a large inheritance would suffice, but find out too late that neither of these will be adequate?
Why should we train our children? God commands it and we do them a disservice leaving them unprepared and ill-equipped for the problems and challenges ahead. Sadly, many parents are preparing the future for their children rather than preparing their children for the future. Our children are not our personal property; they are first and foremost God’s, who’s taken an enormous risk by entrusting them to us and counting on us as parents to be intentional in their training and upbringing. To be entrusted with one of God’s cherished possessions is a ministry many don’t realise.
Who our children will be will reflect the sum of our actions and inactions. We have an enemy who is happy when parents are negligent, passive, and complacent. This is the perfect situation; he needs to take over the minds and hearts of the children.Who should train our children? Some say that it takes a village to raise a child, and there’s certainly a place for that, but who has God given this ultimate responsibility to? The world’s changing much quicker than we can keep up with, and our busy schedules and hectic deadlines leave us with practically little to no time to be intentional about training our children. Isn’t it about how well you spend your time, rather than how much time you have? We might delegate certain aspects of the training of our children to several people, but the support they provide dwarfs compared to what God expects from us. Beyond the four walls of a school or Sunday school, our children are being passively trained by influences they’re exposed to, not limited to social media, influence from family and friends, information from books, just to name a few. As nature abhors a vacuum, if we don’t train our children, other people and several things will train them.
When and where should we train our children? God’s command to the Israelites was to teach their children his laws as they sat at home, as they walked along the way, even while lying down, which seems to be almost all of time. And the result of ignoring this was a generation who didn’t know about the God of their fathers. Our world’s a reflection of many from homes where God is not at the centre of their existence, where godly training is largely absent, and parents have neglected and abandoned their core responsibilities to train their children. And while many parents hope that lots of this training will be ‘caught’, or delay the training to much later, lots of opportunities to train their children are lost. Any opportunity can serve as a training moment: during family meals, while driving to school, after a bereavement or loss, when a child fails, before decisions are made, in season and out of season. If we stay in touch with God’s Spirit, He will prompt us at different times and in different ways.
How should we train our children? Are you training your children the way God intends? Culture’s expectation vs God’s blueprint. Our society has unwritten rules about how to train our children. We end up spending so much time, effort, and resources giving our children the best education and inheritance, but we forget to address other aspects of their lives or check in with God what His plan and purpose is for them. As parents, we are our children’s role model, we can’t expect them to become a different person from who we’re becoming. We’ve got different aspects of ourselves and each aspect would require some intentional training. These include their spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, and social aspects of their lives.
The traumatic events we expose our children are also contributing to their training. Children raised in angry and violent homes grow up to believe this is normal and the only outlet to resolve conflict. Others raised where immorality and idolatry were rife will struggle later in life with these. Many children raised with anxious and avoidance attachment styles will find it challenging to navigate trust, intimacy, and emotional bonds in future relationships. Children exposed to laziness, mediocrity, and apathy will struggle to go the extra mile and strive for excellence.Providing a great education and a large inheritance bereft of a firm spiritual foundation and a stable emotional environment will only leave our child with more dysfunction.
There are many adults who can pray for several hours but cannot regulate their emotions; others can’t manage their time or finances effectively; many lack a vision for their future and cannot lead their lives. Then, there are those who have gained so much but lack the interpersonal skills, unable to work in teams or the capacity to bounce back after adversity. And the list is endless about the several aspects of a child’s life that need training. Parents must not assume that they have all the resources to train their children. In a world that’s developing before our eyes, we must explore several opportunities to train our children so they become well rounded and balanced. What worked when they were toddlers won’t be adequate in their teenage years; we must unlearn and adjust as we find what works for each child. Relying on God’s Spirit will be important as we navigate the complexities of each child’s personality and preferences. We risk raising a child we won’t recognise if we insist on a certain direction. At some point, training a child becomes a collaborative task as we prepare to release them at some point.
What is the way? How do we know the way? There is a way that seems right, but the end of it leads to death and destruction. Our roles as parents are to do all we can to enable our children to discover and pursue God’s plan. What a tragedy to provide everything our children need, but they end up roaming this world with neither purpose nor direction. We’ve all seen or known people whose parents did all they could, but their lives have gone on a different trajectory. Every child will have a different path, and we would need help from God to enable us to walk alongside each child on that path until they can stand on their own. Interestingly, the text doesn’t instruct us to train our children according to our desires or their desires, but according to the path they should follow. How do we discover this way? We must return to the designer who has the blueprint for each child. God is very intentional, he will reveal the details if we wait on him for it, it must break his heart when children depart from the way but he promises to be with us from start to finish on this journey of raising godly children who will pursue his purpose.
When do we consider our children ‘to be old’? Our children may still be under our roof, but they have exhausted all opportunities to learn any more from us. They may appear to follow our lead, but they have long switched off and now have a mind of their own. They may follow us to church events, but only God knows if they are just checking the box or developing their own personal relationship with Jesus. Our children have become old when our instruction, discipline and style of leadership no longer affect their choices and ideologies. Parents want to do all they can, as long as they can, with all they have to leave an impact before their children grow ‘old’. God says if we have trained our children ‘in the way’, when they are old they will not depart, so if our children are departing from the Lord when they are ‘old’, what might be responsible for this? Do we blame the parents? Do we blame the child? Or the environment that might have influenced and shaped many of the decisions they’ve made up to this point?
We have no control over the choices our children will make when they leave home some day but we can continue to cover them in prayers daily. The greatest investment in your child is the time on your knees. Let’s continue to sow the seed of God’s word, and even if they go astray, we trust that God’s word will abide in them and turn their hearts back to him. Our goal is not to make our children become like us but to become like Jesus. The more children you have, the less time, energy and resources to spend on each one. Every child is unique; don’t compare them or compel them to be like someone else. We can all handover the benefits of intentional parenting than the dysfunction we received. No more excuses; it’s time to get to work!