Hear, my son, your father's instruction,
and forsake not your mother's teaching,
9 for they are a graceful garland for your head
and pendants for your neck.
These verses begin the first fatherly counsel. The reference to father and mother in 8 is more than a mere Hebrew parallelism, and we miss a very real point if we assume that is but that. Both father and mother are here assumed to share the children's training, and to speak with one voice in it. This is important. Not only is it unwise and dangerous for the children's wellbeing for one or other parent to contract out of this responsibility for training (e.g. 'I leave that to my wife'), but also, unless they speak with one voice, children will be apt to become bewildered, at best, and at worst, will speedily learn to play off one parent against the other. Parents must present a united front to (but not against) their children: they must both be heard and understood to say the same thing, The 'instruction' of the father and the 'law' of the mother have been summed up in 7: it is this that they are to train their children in, and this that leads to true wisdom. The re- wards of such a pattern are seen in 9. They are not material rewards, but moral, 'the hard-won beauty and authority of goodness', as Kidner puts it. One thinks in this con- nection of the wonderful passage in praise of wisdom in 3:13ff. The great question that arises here is how to convince the young of the sheer worth of such rewards, in a society in which very different standards obtain. Well, there is one very real and decisive con- sideration that must be given all due weight here: if the happiness of the man that finds wisdom (3:13) is incarnated before the eyes of the young in the lives of their parents and spiritual mentors, this will prove to be a more telling influence than any amount of mere verbal instruction without it. Let them but see what it does, and that it works, and it will surely commend itself to them. The stamp of reality must surely make its appeal!