From a biblical perspective, children remain under the counsel of their godly parents throughout the course of their lives. But they are only under the command of their parents while they remain a member of their father’s household and under his protection, provision, and oversight.

There is a great deal of overlap in the training of sons and daughters. But the distinctions are crucial. A key distinction between sons and daughters concerns the goals of their preparation and release. The training of sons should focus on preparing them for independent household leadership. To be qualified for marriage, sons must demonstrate their ability to leave their fathers and stand as a capable, independent household leader. Daughters demonstrate the opposite. The training of daughters should focus on their ability to remain under the authority of a household leader. Daughters who are trained, industrious, content, capable, and comfortable serving beside their fathers (as they will someday serve beside their husbands) demonstrates that they are ready for marriage.

Under normal conditions, neither sons nor daughters are capable of emancipating themselves. Sons leave “for this cause” when they are released by their fathers to do so. This release may include a time to “prepare their fields” before they build their houses, but the goal is to see our sons established in independent household leadership.

Daughters are “given” by their fathers in marriage. The normative pattern is that daughters remain under the authority, protection, and provision of their godly fathers who have, as a primary duty of their fatherhood, the charge to protect their virginity, prepare them for marriage, and someday present them spotless to a groom. Because they are women under the authority, provision, protection, and “roof” of their father, they cannot independently contract or covenant without the blessing of the head of household (Numbers 30).

Remembering that sons leave and daughters are “given” in marriage, an important question for modern Christian fathers to ask is this: “How can I give my daughter away, when I have already directed her to leave?”

To put it another way: How do you seriously intend to give away that which you have already released?

True, we can have a healthy debate about just what constitutes a father releasing his daughter into a state of independence. Is it allowing her to pick and choose various experimental romantic relationships? Is it the act of sending her away from home for four years without the covering of a household head to protect and care for her? Is it having her move to another city, pursue a career and provide for herself?

There should be no real debate that each step of abdication or potential misdirection on the part of modern fathers pushes the women God has entrusted to their care — for protection and provision — further from the biblical ideal. To the extent that modern Christian girls are trained for independent leadership, they are being trained to be men.

The modern Christian family is double-minded and thus unstable in all of its ways. It wants to borrow the feminist vision for training and releasing daughters, while enforcing a code of parental authority which presupposes the principles of biblical patriarchy. I see this same form of “intellectual schizophrenia” with pastors who speak favorably of young women standing in harms way as United States soldiers, and also urge the young men of their congregations to hold the door for women. They want the sentiments of the men on the Titanic (“women and children first”), but the ethics of Gloria Steinam. This is an impoverished breed of “Christianity” because having reduced bold manhood and virtuous womanhood to mere sentimentalism it becomes worse than useless.

Modern fathers living in a post-Christian, feminized America must make choices. They cannot have it both ways. They cannot, on the one hand, release their daughters into a state of manly independence, and on the other hand, demand of them submission to their parental authority. This confusion has resulted in many daughters who are provoked to wrath because they simply don’t know where they stand or what is expected of them.

Dads — it’s time to love our sons and daughters enough that we will go back to the ancient paths wherein there is hope.