Train up a child in the way he should go;
even when he is old he will not depart from it.Proverbs 22:6
There is a sense in which a child does not 'have it in him' to live properly, because of the Fall, any more than an apprentice has it in him to be a mechanic, although he may have an aptitude in things mechanical. In the same way, inasmuch as a child is made in the image of God, he has the basic aptitude; but if he is left to his own devices, he will certainly 'go to the dogs'. Hence the need for training. Kidner's comment is again worthy of study: 'Proverbs is well known for its praise of the rod. Its maxim 'he that spareth his rod hateth his son' (13:24) is a corollary of its serious doctrine of wisdom; for if wisdom is life itself (8:35, 36), a hard way is better to it than a soft way to death…. The way has to be hard, for two reasons. First, 'foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child': it will take more than words to dislodge it (22:15). Secondly, character (in which wisdom embodies itself) is a plant that grows more sturdily for some cutting back - and this from early days…. In 'a child left to himself' the only predictable product is shame (29:15).' It is salutary to have such a statement before us, in a day when we have become so bedevilled by psychology that some people are almost afraid to look at a child lest they create a complex in it that will twist all its future. We are now reaping the sorry harvest of decades of such thinking, in the problems we face with young people today. If, however, the vision of what this verse implies lays hold of us, children will be brought up to adjust to situations that when they become adults they will be real adults, not emotional and psychological juveniles who will never grow up. Most of the major problems in this area of society, and in the Christian Church, are caused by people with arrested development, adults in years and in body, but infants in moral and emotional stature. When children are trained, however, with all due regard to their individuality and vocation, but with short shrift given to their self-will, then when they reach adult life, something will have been done in them, and they will have been set in a particular course.