Train ‘em Up or Down

It never ceases to amaze me how some parents just don’t get it. Now “it” could refer to any number of things but in this case “it” is the importance of providing a positive role model for our children.

My father didn’t have the benefit of higher education and he would have admitted that he was far from a perfect teacher but he taught me many things by example that have served me well. One such lesson was to never expect someone to do something you aren’t prepared to do yourself. To me that translated into never doing anything or going anywhere that I wouldn’t want my children to be part of. Somehow I think a lot of parents must have missed that lesson from their parents because they certainly aren’t passing it on to their kids. I see parents engaged in behaviours that they don’t want their kids to do but they don’t seem to understand the power of their example.

I can remember my father telling me that if I got into trouble at school I would be in trouble when I got home. That wasn’t good for me because trouble just seemed to sneak up and find me. No matter how hard I tried to protest my innocence, my parents always backed the teacher and there was never a time when either of my them ever questioned the disciplinary actions that left me thinking they had somehow secretly conspired to gang up on innocent little me.

In today’s society the story is all but reversed. It almost seems as if the little Johnnies and Janies of today have been immaculately conceived, spawned from perfect parents and entirely above reproach. Any evidence of rebuke, chastisement or withdrawal of privileges at school results in sympathy at home and a parental expedition to the school to plead the case of the poor innocent babes, who are after all, are only repeating what they have seen at home.

The same thing happens in church. There are parents, who demonstrate little if any spiritual maturity or desire to grow, and then expect volunteer church workers to create little saints and undo in one hour, what they have been modelling all week.

The Bible is pretty clear in Proverbs 22:6 that if we “train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it.” However I am not so sure that people understand that the Proverb works both ways, positively and negatively. As such we as parents need to make the choice of whether or not to take our roles seriously and train ‘em up or down. The biggest determining factor in that will be what we do and not what we say.