Training Up Your Child

Every child is born with a sin nature and a bent toward evil. It doesn’t take long to figure that out. Temper tantrums emerge as early as the terrible twos, if not before. It becomes even more obvious as a child gets older and especially as they enter the teenage years. 

Proverbs bluntly says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (22:15). This Old Testament wisdom literature also points out that youth lack the kind of sense needed to make wise moral choices (7:7). 

So parents must “train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).