Train Up a Child...

By Candace G. Carson-Smith

I’ve carried this memory with me for years. I will never forget it. I was driving one day in Washington D.C. and drove past a woman standing at a bus stop with her toddler. As I was sitting in the stopped traffic, I looked and saw her begin to start spanking her toddler because the child had reached down onto the pavement and picked up cigarette butts.

Obviously, this corporal punishment was inappropriate especially because of the child’s age. Full stop. It’s completely normal for a toddler to want to explore the environment in atactile way. The appropriate thing to have done would be to remove the cigarette bud from the child’s hands and put the child on the bus stop bench somehow away from the ground so that they couldn’t reach anything.

My heart sank and I judged the mother harshly in my heart. I repented. I wondered aloud if I should have done something. My heart sank. I judged myself harshly. Indeed, I am a mother and have certainly made my own fair share of mistakes in parenting.

Our Bible says: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6) It also says in Proverbs 13:24 “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them”

The above scriptures when translated in Greek and Hebrew does not translate into giving parents’ permission to beat their children. I encourage you to do a word study on this in your own personal time.

What if we globally shifted our understanding of scripture as it relates to parenting? What if instead of using the above scriptures to justify physically abusing children, we began to look at parenting as an assignment to instill spiritual disciplines into our children? Wouldn’t that be in alignment with scripture?

If I train my child to rise early and sing worship and praise to the LORD, have I not trained them up in the way they should go?

If I teach my children to write down and record their daily dreams in a journal and to pray and ask God for interpretation of the dream, have I not trained up my child in the way they should go?

A human being is an entity that is a spirit, that has a soul and lives in a body. It might be more effective to raise a child with spiritual disciplines that organically yield the peaceable fruit of righteous living rather than trying to ‘beat,’ obedience into them.

Physical punishment might indeed train the flesh to obey in the same way that one might train an animal to obey, but our children are human beings with hearts.

If a parent trains their child’s flesh to obey them, but loses their heart both for them and for God in the process- what was really accomplished?

Candace G. Carson-Smith is a work in progress. 

Currently, she is manifested in the Earth as the Founder & President of The Intelligentsia Agency, Inc. (www.theintelligentsia.co) a national speakers bureau, as well as wife to Reverend Marcus A. Smith, and mom to Nina.