Proverbs 22:6 “Train a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
This is one of those very common verses about parenting and I only start with this because it is Feb. 22 and I’m reading the “proverb” of the day kind of thing.
The word “train” is also translated in other places to mean a dedication or consecration and is used to describe those who are experienced.
There is another understanding of the word “train” and that is to motivate or initiate. The word is used in Arabic to describe how a parent would rub juice or oil on the baby’s palate to motivate him/her to suck, getting them to eat that which would help them grow healthy. However, the suggestion is made that this Arabic understanding is a latter connotation almost a 1000 years after this proverbs was originally written and therefore was not the original intent of meaning.
Either case, it’s pretty obvious that the word calls parents to be intentional in starting the influence. Influence that centers “according to the mouth of his way (literal translation).” The way describes the paths of righteousness, wisdom, understanding, discipline, etc. versus the paths of wickedness, fools, driven by uncontrolling human desires all of which the writer has been stressing since chapter 1. (There has been other debate on what “according to the mouth of his way/path/bent?” means but to suggest the parent trains the child according to the child’s way would suggest that the child know the best way he should already go?)
But there is certainly much to say about training and making the child experienced in their words, (keeping in line with the transliteration). Just as James says in 3:2-3 “For we all stumble in many ways. If someone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect individual, able to control the entire body as well. 3 And if we put bits into the mouths of horses to get them to obey us, then we guide their entire bodies.”
And since children are always watching us and learning our ways, we must be intentional about what comes out of our mouth. A lesson that I am forever learning.
In the end I believe the verse means this: that we must devote/dedicate our children at a very early age to become experienced in the way he/she should go and we must be intentional about what that is. As I like to say it around here, we must provide intentional Christian nurture for our youth to grow in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
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