Proverbs 4:20 My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings
We are living in a day of passive parenting. That is an oxymoron because those are conflicting concepts. You can be passive or you can be a parent, but you really can’t be both. If you are a parent, you can’t be passive, just letting things happen, and if you are just letting things happen, you are not really parenting. The alternative to passive parenting is not necessarily being a “helicopter parent” where you just hover over every child all the time, but you are to be active and deliberate in the way you rear and raise your children.
You see, you cannot train your child until you own your responsibility. Proverbs 4:20 says, “My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings.” In the first seven chapters of Proverbs, you find a lot of personal possessives like my son, my wisdom, my understanding, my words, my sayings. So, here is a dad who is taking ownership and realizes his responsibility. You cannot train your child until you own your responsibility.
There are a number of responsibilities that ought to be owned up to, but let me mention three that are in this section. First, own your law. This is referring to your guidance or rules. No one likes the concept of rules, not even the people making the rules. But if you don’t like the word rule, how about commandment or law. That is what it is called in the book of Proverbs. In Proverbs 4:2 the father says to his son, “For I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law.” In Proverbs 3:1 it says, “My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments.”
Who is going to guide your kids? Proverbs 4:11 says, “I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right paths.” You see, if I don’t guide my children, somebody will, and that is not their responsibility, right, or privilege. It is not just an honor to raise children, it is a responsibility. It is not me to my child; it is me to God. I stand before God as the parent of my child. So, own your own laws. You say, “Wil Rice’s family gets to do thus and so.” Well, your family is not my family and my family is not yours. You may have different guidance than I do, but I will stand before God for my family and you will stand before God for yours.
Second, own your experience. Again, in Proverbs 4 the Bible speaks of the father’s father. The father is talking to his child and hearkening back to his own father. He says in verse 3, “For I was my father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.” So, own your experience.
There is a reason that parents are always talking about the old days, you know, walking uphill to school in the snow both ways. The reason for that is because kids cannot likewise say, “Well, when I was a father…” The child has never been a parent, and though kids sometimes think their parents don’t understand them, which may well be true, a parent has been a child. So, own your experience, but don’t let your past blackmail your child’s future. Don’t say, “Well, I can’t tell them not to because I did when I was their age,” or “I can’t make them do it because I didn’t when I was their age.” That is all the more reason to help your child. Don’t blackmail their future because of your past. We should learn from our past so we can teach from both our successes and our failures.
Finally, own your priority, what matters to you. Verse 7 says, Wisdom is the principle thing.” Now, I am all for viola lessons, karate, football, soccer and all these other things we have our kids do, but the priority is not to be good, gifted, or rich. The goal is to have God’s wisdom to have a clue about life and discernment about what really matters. So, how do you own your responsibility? You own it when you give yourself to God because you cannot train your child until you own your responsibility as a parent.