The Training of Children

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. PROVERBS 22:6

Catherine Booth once remarked that she had often listened to men lecturing women on the duties of motherhood and thought, it is all very good, but you don’t know much about it after all. When she spoke on The Training of Children, she spoke as the mother of eight, raised on little money while she preached and her husband travelled. It is one of the longest addresses among her works in the Ochorus library, and one of the most practical. It is also, in places, one of the hardest to read today.

Whose child is this

Her first question was the one she thought settled everything else: to whom does this child belong? Christian parents, she said, had dedicated their children to God before they were born and again at their christening, and then promptly forgot it. “Settle it in your minds that your child belongs absolutely to God, and not to you,” she told the mothers, “that you are only stewards for God.” Every mistake in training, she thought, flowed from forgetting that. Parents who think the child is theirs will train it for their own comfort, pride or ambition. Parents who know the child is God’s will train it for Him.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children. DEUTERONOMY 6:6–7

She reminded them, too, of their power. A young child’s trust in its parents is almost unbounded; what mother says is the end of all controversy. That influence, wisely used, never wears out. Foolishly frittered away, it is gone by the teenage years.

Teaching is not training

Her central distinction was between teaching and training. Many religious parents, she said, cram their children with catechism, Scripture and hymns, and never train them at all. She used the image of a vine. A vinedresser who went to the vine every morning and told it which way to grow, and then left it alone, would get a wild vine. He must nail the branch where it should go, and cut away what is not wanted. So with children. “You must not only teach,” she said, “you must be at the trouble to train.”

She gave a small, vivid example. A mother is busy with some important work; her children are playing round her. The eldest snatches his brother’s toy, a fight breaks out, and the mother, without looking up, tells him he is naughty and complains that no one ever had such troublesome children. Only yesterday she had taught them a lesson on brotherly love. Now was the moment to train, and she let it go. What if it had cost half an hour? What work could have been more important?

Example

She was unsparing about the example parents set. “No mother will succeed in begetting in her child a greater antipathy towards any sin than she feels for it herself,” she said. Children, she observed, are the quickest of all analysts; they judge not by what we say but by how we feel. A mother who teaches truthfulness and then gushes over a visitor she privately dislikes has given her child a better lesson in deceit than any lecture on honesty could undo. She gave homely examples: the mother who promises a pony every time she goes out and never brings one; the mother who smacks the naughty table the baby bumped into; the mother who pretends the medicine is sweet.

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. EPHESIANS 6:4

Interest and early faith

Two of her convictions were well ahead of her time. The first was that religion should be interesting. “The one great rule to be observed in all teaching is to make your lessons interesting,” she said. Children know by instinct when their parents’ hearts are not in what they are doing, and a dull, cold, dutiful religion drives many of them away for good. She described her own Sundays: Bible stories told to her eldest on her knee from the age of two, a Noah’s Ark kept for Sunday use, lively songs and short prayers the children repeated after her, and then the little ones going off to the nursery to hold the whole service again among themselves.

The second was that children can be converted young. Many parents, she said, seemed to expect their children to live in sin until sixteen or so and then be dramatically converted like drunkards. Why? “Why may not the minds of children be renewed very early?” A child whose will is yielded to God can be renewed by the Spirit as truly as an adult. And Jesus said, Suffer the little children to come unto me (Mark 10:14).

And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 2 TIMOTHY 3:15

Weighing it: the will of the child

Here the modern reader must pause. Her first rule of training was to secure obedience, and to secure it early. She told the mothers that she had conquered her own strong-willed children at six and ten months old, and described how a mother should hold a resisting six-month-old down in his cot until he gave in, however long it took. She warned that if the child won the first battle, the mother was undone.

Much of what she meant is sound. Consistent, affectionate authority does give children security, and she was right that parents who never say no, or who say it without meaning it, do their children no kindness. But her language of conquest, and her readiness to see a battle of wills in an infant, will trouble many readers, and rightly. An infant’s crying is not rebellion, and a parent who treats it so may do harm. Scripture’s counsel to parents is not only to rule but also not to provoke or discourage.

Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged. COLOSSIANS 3:21

A second caution concerns her warning that God does not bind Himself to save the children of negligent parents. She meant it as a spur. But parents whose children have wandered despite years of faithful love may hear it as condemnation. The father in the parable did not cause the prodigal to leave, and he did not stop watching the road. Faithful training is a means God uses, not a guarantee we can claim or a debt He owes.

Train them for God

Her deepest counsel is also her simplest. A father once told her he must do something for his sons’ future. No, she said: you must train them for God, and leave God to do for them. She warned against ambition for position, the love of money, and sending children away to school before their characters were formed. What she wanted was children who knew they belonged to God and would give their lives to His purposes. She gave hers, one by one.

For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD. GENESIS 18:19

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Say aloud, as a parent or guardian: this child belongs to God, and I am a steward. What changes if you really believe it?

2. Identify one virtue you teach your children in words but undermine by your example. Begin with yourself.

3. Look for the next ordinary moment to train rather than scold, and take the time it needs.

4. Make one element of your family’s worship genuinely interesting this week.

5. If a child of yours has wandered, bring your grief to God without self-condemnation, and keep watching the road.

A PRAYER

Father, these children are Yours, not mine. Forgive me for training them for my comfort and my pride.

Make my example match my words. Let them see in me a hatred of sin and a love for You that is real.

Give me patience, firmness and tenderness together, and keep me from provoking them to anger.

Draw them to Yourself while they are young. And for those who have wandered, hold them, and bring them home. Amen.