Berean Standard Bible
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
King James Version
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
About this verse
"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." The first verb is the strong one — train up is deliberate, early, and sustained, a word associated with dedicating something to its purpose. And the object of the training is a direction, "the way he should go": not information deposited but a path worn in, the kind of formation that happens at dinner tables and in a thousand unremarkable repetitions.
This sits among the collected sayings of Proverbs, Israel's wisdom tradition associated with Solomon. That genre matters for reading it rightly. A proverb states how life generally works, not an ironclad guarantee — the same book describes fools who were raised well and refused it all. Treating this verse as a formula has quietly crushed faithful parents whose grown children walked away, as if the outcome proved defective training. Wisdom literature does not do math like that.
Read as wisdom rather than contract, the verse both charges and comforts. It charges: early formation is not neutral; direction gets set when the wood is green. And it comforts the parent of the prodigal: what was planted early tends to endure, sometimes resurfacing decades on. Sowing matters even when the harvest is delayed.
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