“Nice win! All right, we’re done for the night,” I said to my 6-year-old son. “Time to put the cards away.”
“Ugh, I wanted to play another game!” he said, pouting.
“Sorry bud, it’s already a little past bedtime. We need to get you to sleep.”
Out burst an emphatic “no!” accompanied by angry crocodile tears. “I’m not done playing!”
“I love playing with you too! But remember: I said we could only play one round before bed. Time to pack it up.”
My diplomatic words did little to soothe my son’s pain. Genuinely upset, he let his angry tears flow all the more. He was tired. He was disappointed. He was exasperated.
Uh oh, I thought to myself, remembering Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children.” Is this what Paul had in mind?
After all, exasperate means “provoke to anger.” The King James Version even famously translated this passage as “provoke not your children to wrath”—and that is exactly what I was doing by setting and holding a boundary for my son. In our highly therapeutic age, we’re more tempted than ever to interpret someone else’s distress as evidence of our own wrongdoing.
Paul gives a similar command in Colossians 3:21: “Do not embitter your children.” But as anyone who’s recently interacted with any toddlers, most kids, or some teens can attest, these can feel like impossible commands.
So what did Paul have in view when he gave these instructions to fathers?
As a relatively new dad myself—my kids are 6 and 4—I’ve wrestled with these texts and Paul’s heart behind them. What I’ve concluded is that Paul has three things in view: (1) remember the goal of fatherhood, (2) recognize that correction must be the capstone—not the foundation—of fathering, and (3) allow the means and methods of God’s fatherhood to trickle down into your own fathering.
In Colossians 3:21, Paul warns that when dads parent provocatively, the kids “will become discouraged.” Discouragement is the shriveling of the soul, self, and spirit. Fathers have the capacity to squelch the image of God in their kids, making them feeble, insecure, and ignorant. A father has the power to cause a spirited child to lose his or her spark, to make a courageous child a coward.
This is not the goal. Fatherhood is not meant to be like breaking a wild horse, promoting subservience and dutiful compliance. A good father should be the wind in his children’s sails.
That’s hard to do if you’re focusing on taming your children, but it’s a natural result of doing what Paul describes in the second half of Ephesians 6:4: “Bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” The root of the Greek word translated as “bring up”—ektrephō—could also be translated as “to feed” or “to nourish,” and is shepherding language (as it appears in Gen. 47:17 in the Septuagint). We want our children to grow, to be well-fed, and to be “strong and courageous” (Josh. 1:9). This not merely physical but emotional and spiritual as well.
I used to long for a model that would help me evaluate myself, with all my baggage, as a father: some kind of standard I could be graded on. After all, it’s easy to feel that you’re doing a good job as a dad if you compare yourself to the wrong people. And it’s easy to feel like a huge loser if you compare yourself to the right people.
I don’t want to feel simply good or bad; I want to deal with reality. I want to compare myself to God the Father, admit I fall short of his glory, be assured of grace, and then labor to do the best job I can for the well-being of my kids, not the well-being of my self-esteem.
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