Train Children With Presence, Wisdom, and Grace

THE WORD

The Hebrew word translated “train up” is chanak — and it carries within it the imagery of a craftsman or a midwife who places something on the palate of a newborn to create an immediate taste and association. It is the language of deliberate, intentional, precision formation. It is not accidental. It is not osmosis. It is not “I lived my faith in front of them and hoped they would absorb it.” It is the purposeful, strategic, consistent shaping of a child’s fundamental orientation — their default way of thinking about God, the world, themselves, and their purpose. Training is what a craftsman does to raw material to make it into something specific and purposeful. And the promise attached to this kind of intentional spiritual formation is extraordinary: even when they are old, they will not depart from it. The imprint of deliberate, God-directed training outlasts every other influence.

Here is the confronting question: in the competition between the training you are providing and the training the world is providing for your children, who is winning? The world is training your children every single day — through the screens they are given access to from the earliest ages, through the music that plays in the background of their developing minds, through the cultural values embedded in the entertainment they consume, through the peer influences that shape their sense of what is normal, desirable, and acceptable. The world’s training program is comprehensive, consistent, expertly resourced, and relentlessly executed. Meanwhile, many Christian parents are offering their children a Sunday morning counterweight to 40+ hours per week of opposing formation — and wondering why their teenagers are rejecting the faith. The question is not whether your children are being trained. They are. The question is whether you are the primary trainer or a footnote in someone else’s training program. You are more intentional about your child’s athletic development than their spiritual formation.

Proverbs offers wisdom, not a mechanical guarantee that faithful parenting controls every adult outcome. Children possess agency and differ in temperament, disability, development, and circumstance. Technology is a tool, not an automatic enemy. Parents need grace, community, age-appropriate boundaries, honest repair, and support—not contempt. Formation aims for wisdom and relationship rather than surveillance or domination.