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This page sets out what Scripture teaches about raising children, from the cradle to the day they leave home. If your son or daughter has turned from the faith and you wonder whether God’s promise failed, or whether you did, read the part on Proverbs 22:6 first. If you are worn out and ashamed of how you have parented, read the part on grace. If you are raising children alone, or someone else’s, or your grandchildren, there is a word for you too. If a child is being hurt by anyone, get the child safe first. If your teenager talks of wanting to die, or you do, call 988 or text 988 today.
A Gift and a Covenant
The world often counts children as a cost. God speaks of them another way.
Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
Psalm 127:3-5 (KJV)
A heritage is given, not earned. Your children are lent to you by God, who owns them and will ask how you cared for them. The arrows are a picture, and what they picture is real. An arrow is shaped with care, aimed, and then let go. It was never meant to stay in the hand.
For believers there is more. God promised Abraham to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee (Genesis 17:7). That did not end when Christ came. At Pentecost Peter said, For the promise is unto you, and to your children (Acts 2:39). So the sign of the covenant still belongs to the children of believers, as circumcision once did.
Not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one or both believing parents are to be baptized.
Westminster Confession of Faith 28.4
Our Baptist brothers baptize only those who profess faith, but this page holds with the Confession. Be clear about what baptism does not do. It does not make a child born again, and not all who are baptized are undoubtedly regenerated (WCF 28.5). No parent can give a child a new heart. Salvation is of the Lord (Jonah 2:9).
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
John 3:8 (KJV)
Listeth means pleases. You cannot command the wind, and you cannot command new birth. What you can do is raise your children where the Spirit has promised to work, under his Word and among his people. Do not presume your child is saved because he was baptized, and do not doubt that he may be saved because he is young. Call him, every day of his life, to repent and believe for himself.
Teaching Them in the Ordinary Day
The great command, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, comes with a charge to parents fastened to it (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (KJV)
Notice the order. The words are in your heart first, and then you teach them. A parent cannot pass on what he does not have. Then notice where the teaching happens. It is breakfast, and the drive to practice, and bedtime. Most of a child’s training in the faith is not a lesson. It is a parent who speaks of God as naturally as of the weather, because God is that real to him.
Binding the words on the hand and between the eyes is a picture (Deuteronomy 6:8). What it pictures is real. God’s Word is to rule what your hands do and what your eyes look at.
Reformed households have long leaned on three helps. The first is the Shorter Catechism, which sets the whole faith out in short answers a child can learn. What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever (WSC 1). Ask what the answers mean, and keep at it into the teen years, when they begin to bear weight. The second is daily family worship. The third is keeping the Lord’s Day together. A child who sees his parents delight in that day learns something no lesson can teach.
Fathers, Mothers, and Children
Fathers
And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4 (KJV)
A father answers to God first for his household. Nurture is the training of a whole life. Admonition is the warning word, spoken in time. The warning to fathers comes first, and Paul gives the reason elsewhere, lest they be discouraged (Colossians 3:21). A child can be crushed by a father who is never pleased, who mocks, or who keeps none of the rules he makes. The Larger Catechism names among the sins of parents correcting their children unduly and provoking them to wrath (WLC 130). A father who is absent while sitting in the same room discourages too. If your anger frightens your family, read the part on anger today.
Mothers
A mother’s teaching carries real authority. My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother (Proverbs 1:8). Proverbs 31 opens with what a king’s mother taught him, and closes with a woman who rises while it is yet night for her household. In her tongue is the law of kindness, and her children arise up, and call her blessed (Proverbs 31:1, 15, 26, 28). Her strength is that she feareth the Lord (Proverbs 31:30).
Paul told Titus that older women should teach the younger to love their children and to be keepers at home (Titus 2:3-5). It is striking that love for children has to be taught. Older mothers have much to give younger ones. Keepers at home makes the home a mother’s first field of work. Faithful Reformed believers differ on how that bears on work outside it, but none may treat the home as an afterthought.
Children
Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.
Ephesians 6:1-3 (KJV)
In the Lord means in all things lawful. No parent may command a child to sin, for we ought to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). This is the fifth commandment, and the Larger Catechism opens it up (WLC 123-133). Children owe their parents reverence and willing obedience, and they are to bear with their parents’ weaknesses and cover them in love (WLC 127). Parents owe their children love, prayer, teaching, correction, and a life worth following (WLC 129). The commandment runs both ways. Even its promise of long life is given as far as it shall serve for God’s glory and their own good (WLC 133). Some obedient children die young. Hold on to that for the part on Proverbs below.
Discipline
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child (Proverbs 22:15), as it is in ours, and a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame (Proverbs 29:15). Eli was judged because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not (1 Samuel 3:13). Correct calmly and consistently, never in a rage and never to shame. Aim at the heart, and end with the child restored and held. The full treatment is in What the Bible Says About Spanking and Discipline.
Is Proverbs 22:6 a Promise?
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)
Many parents read this verse as a guarantee. Then a son walks away from the faith at nineteen, and the verse becomes an accusation. Either God broke his word, or the parents broke the formula. Neither is true. The way out is to read the verse as the kind of writing it is.
Taking the Bible literally means taking each part as it was meant to be taken. A psalm is a song, a law is a law, and a proverb is a proverb. Proverbs are wholly true, because they are God’s Word. But a proverb is a short saying that tells how God has ordered life to go as a rule. It does not stop to list the exceptions. The book of Proverbs shows this itself.
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.
Proverbs 26:4-5 (KJV)
Both are true, and no one can follow both at once. Wisdom knows which fits the fool in front of you. Or take the hand of the diligent maketh rich (Proverbs 10:4). That is how life usually goes, and a lazy man should hear it. Yet the same Bible says the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong (Ecclesiastes 9:11). The fear of the Lord prolongeth days (Proverbs 10:27), and yet righteous Abel’s days were cut short by his brother (Genesis 4:8, Matthew 23:35). None of these sayings is false. Each is a general truth of wisdom, and the rest of Scripture shows where it bends.
So it is with Proverbs 22:6. It is a real encouragement, and parents should lean on it. God ordinarily uses faithful teaching in the home to bring children to himself, and many wanderers have come home late, carried back by words they heard at their mother’s table. Train your children with hope. But the verse is not a contract that makes a child’s salvation the wage of a parent’s work. It cannot be, because salvation is of the Lord. And Scripture shows it is not. Hezekiah did right though his father Ahaz did not, and his own son Manasseh did evil (2 Kings 16:2, 18:3, 21:2). God himself said, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me (Isaiah 1:2). That was no failure in his fathering.
Reading the verse rightly guards against two sins. If your children walk with God, do not take the credit. It was grace, and other parents did as much as you and are weeping tonight. If your child has wandered, do not decide that God has broken his word, and do not carry your child’s sin as your own (Ezekiel 18:20). Confess where you did wrong, and keep praying. When Your Child Walks Away From the Lord is written for you.
The Teen Years
The first chapters of Proverbs are mostly a father talking to a son on the edge of manhood. My son, he says, again and again. He warns him about friends who will entice him into violence for quick money (Proverbs 1:10-19), and about the strange woman, whose lips drop as an honeycomb (Proverbs 5:3). That is the Bible’s picture of raising a teenager, long and honest talk about what the world is about to press on him.
The aim shifts in these years. You still require obedience while he lives under your roof, but now you are reaching for the heart. My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways (Proverbs 23:26). Obedience without the heart rarely survives the day he leaves. It may comfort you that Mary and Joseph did not understand their son at twelve, and he was without sin. He went home and was subject unto them, and his mother kept all these sayings in her heart (Luke 2:48-51). Not understanding your teenager for a season is not always a sign that something is wrong.
Talking and Listening
Be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath (James 1:19). He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him (Proverbs 18:13). If you jump to the lecture the moment your daughter tells you something hard, she will stop telling you. Teens often open up late at night, or side by side in the car. Moses already named those times, when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down. Stay up for it.
Phones and Screens
A phone with the open internet puts the whole world in a child’s pocket, its foulest parts included. Scripture gives no age for a first phone, and Christian families draw the lines in different places. But David said, I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes (Psalm 101:3). The Larger Catechism counts among the sins of parents careless exposing, or leaving them to wrong, temptation, and danger (WLC 130). An unfiltered phone behind a closed bedroom door is exactly that.
Keep screens out of bedrooms at night. Use filters, and tell your children why. Then go first. A father who scrolls through supper cannot tell his son to put the phone down. If your child is already caught in pornography, do not explode. Help him fight it, and read the part on pornography together. Tell your children that if anyone online pressures them for pictures or threatens them, they can come to you without shame. That is a crime against them, and you should report it.
Friends
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
Proverbs 13:20 (KJV)
Teenagers become like the friends they keep. Know their friends by name. Open your home and feed them, so your house is where they gather. Do not only forbid bad company. Help them find good.
Letting Go
The goal is not a child who needs you forever. It is a grown man or woman who fears God when you are not in the room. A man shall leave his father and his mother (Genesis 2:24), and the arrow was made to fly. Hannah brought Samuel to the house of the Lord when the child was young, and said, I have lent him to the Lord (1 Samuel 1:24-28). Every parent must give his children up to God in his own way. Hand over responsibility a little at a time while they are still at home, and move from command toward counsel. When they set up their own homes, the obedience of a child under your roof gives way, but the duty to honor never ends (Mark 7:10-12). You become a counselor, not a ruler. That is not losing them. It is what you were raising them for.
Praying for Them
Job’s children were grown and keeping their own houses, and still he rose up early in the morning and offered for every one of them. For Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts (Job 1:5). You do not know their hearts either. Pray for each by name every day, for their souls first, and then for their purity and their future homes. Pray as Christ prayed for his own, not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil (John 17:15). Your prayers go where you cannot.
Single Parents, Step-Parents, and Grandparents
Single parents. God is a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows (Psalm 68:5). Timothy knew the holy scriptures from a child, taught by his mother and grandmother, and Scripture says only that his father was a Greek (Acts 16:1, 2 Timothy 1:5, 3:15). Ask your church to stand with you, and let godly men and women into your children’s lives.
Step-parents. Joseph raised a son who was not his by blood, and Mary still said to Jesus, thy father and I (Luke 2:48). Your authority will grow with trust. At first, let the child’s own parent lead in correction while you win the child’s heart, and never speak against the other parent in his hearing.
Grandparents. Children’s children are the crown of old men (Proverbs 17:6). Tell your grandchildren what God has done, as Moses told Israel to teach thy sons, and thy sons’ sons (Deuteronomy 4:9). Pray for them, and stand behind their parents even where you would have done things differently.
Parenting Under a Patient Father
Every honest parent knows how often he has failed. There was the angry word at bedtime, and the promise forgotten. You need more than better methods. You need a Father yourself.
Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.
Psalm 103:13-14 (KJV)
God disciplines his children, but always for their good and with great patience.
For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness.
Hebrews 12:10 (KJV)
After their own pleasure means as seemed best to them. Our fathers did what they thought right, and sometimes they got it wrong. God never does (Hebrews 12:5-11). Because he is that kind of Father to you, you can correct your children as he corrects you, patiently and for their good, never to get even.
But how does a sinner become one of God’s children? Not by growing up in a Christian home, and not by trying harder. The Son of God bore the wrath that sinners deserved on the cross, and on the third day he rose from the dead. All who turn from their sin and trust in him are forgiven and adopted, and receive the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). If you are not sure you are his, read the gospel and come to him today.
Then let your children see grace at work in you. When you sin against them, say so plainly and ask their forgiveness. Few things teach a child the gospel like a parent who repents. Grace never excuses sin, yours or theirs, but it means your home does not have to run on fear. Your children’s deepest need is not perfect parents. It is the Savior their imperfect parents point to.
What to Do This Week
- Begin family worship, or begin again. Tonight after supper, read a short passage, sing a psalm, and pray. Ten minutes is enough.
- Learn one catechism question together. Say it at meals all week.
- Spend time alone with each child. With a teenager, ask one real question and then listen far more than you talk.
- Look hard at the screens in your home. Start with your own. Settle a rule, explain it, and keep it yourself first.
- Confess one sin to your children. If you have been harsh or absent or unfair, tell them so, and ask their forgiveness.
- Pray for each child by name every morning. Write down what you ask, so in time you can see what God has done.
- Ask for help. Talk to your elders, or to an older couple whose children are grown. You were never meant to do this alone.