Read the verse slowly and count the words that describe the child. There are two of them: righteous and wise.
We tend to read those two as one idea said twice. They are not. They are two separate jobs, and most homes only do one of them.
Notice something else the Good News Translation does here. It says parents, not only the father, and it says child, not only the son. Both of them are in the sentence, and so is the daughter.
Reflection
1The Verse Asks for Two Things
Righteous is what a person does when nobody is watching. It is handing back the change that came out wrong. It is meeting the deadline with nobody chasing you. It is telling the truth on the day when lying would be easier and cheaper.
Wise is knowing what to do when nobody explained. It is choosing between two good options. It is sensing when to speak and when to stay quiet. It is reading the room before answering.
Now look at what happens when one of the two is missing.
The honest child with no judgment is the one everybody loves and nobody can protect. He lends his name to the wrong friend. He signs the contract he did not read. He gives twenty years of honest work to something that was never going to succeed, and nobody had the courage to tell him.
The clever child with no character is more frightening, because it works well for a long time. He rises fast, solves problems, impresses the whole room. Until the day the same intelligence that solved the company's problem finds a better way to solve his own.
The verse asks for both at once. And notice the order it puts them in: righteous comes first.
2The Lesson You Teach Without Knowing
If these are two jobs, the practical question follows: how is any of it taught?
Two verses further down, the chapter answers, and the answer is uncomfortable: "Pay close attention, son, and let my life be your example."
There are two sources there, and they appear in an order worth noticing. What I say comes first in the sentence. My life is what closes it.
Which means the lesson is running all the time, especially in the hours when you do not know you are teaching. In traffic. In the conversation about the client who did not pay. In the way you talk about somebody who has just left the room. In what you do with the change that came out wrong, now that a child is watching.
Your child will forget most of the advice you gave. Your child will not forget how you reacted.
3The Return You Do Not Control
Now the honest part, which no conversation about raising children can skip.
Proverbs describes how things usually work. It does not sign a warranty.
Today's text says the parents of a righteous and wise child have good reason to be happy. It does not say that every devoted parent will receive a child like that. There is another person in this story, with a will of their own, and that person also decides.
This cuts both ways, and both of them bring relief.
If your child is on the right path, part of that came from you and part of it came as grace. Give thanks for it instead of boasting about it among friends.
And if your child is not, the verse is not pointing a finger at you. Good parents have difficult children. Upright homes produce people who choose badly. The Bible is full of those cases, starting in the first garden.
What is in your hands is the lesson. The outcome rests with God and with the person he made free.