Start Them on the Way

Proverbs 22:6. Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.

The verb at the front is the one to notice. Start them, or train them, or dedicate them; the Hebrew carries the sense of setting something on its course. Parents do not finish children. They begin them. They point them down a road and walk the first stretch alongside, and then the child keeps walking.

The proverb is a proverb, not a contract. It describes how things generally go, and Proverbs itself knows of sons who despise their mothers and children who go their own way. But the general truth holds. What is planted early tends to remain. The songs a child sings at five are still in her at seventy. The habits of prayer, the sense that God is real and near, the pattern of a household that forgives, these settle deep.

With school starting again in many places this month, it is a good verse for parents and grandparents. You are not building a finished person. You are starting one on the way.