The most misused verse in the chapter, and one this catalog handles with the same care it gave 23:13–14. Read the "does not mean" section; it is the point of the entry.
Quick answer
The verse's own vocabulary decides how it must be read. Withholding correction is what it calls hatred and correcting is what it calls love, so motive is the test, and rage is disqualified by the sentence being quoted.
Read both lines
In its own setting the rod is a real instrument of household discipline, and the book endorses correction as a parent's responsibility without embarrassment. But notice what the verse actually measures. It does not describe a technique or prescribe a severity; it names two motives and attaches each to an outcome. Withholding correction is called hatred. Correcting is called love, and the second line's verb carries the sense of seeking early, which the NKJV footnotes as promptly. So the commended thing is formation, undertaken by a parent who loves the child, begun before problems harden. The word for that formation is musar, the chapter's framing term from verses 1 and 18, and it means the whole shaping work of raising someone rather than the striking of a blow.
What it does not mean
Two misuses pull in opposite directions and both need naming.
This verse cannot justify harming a child. It has been quoted to excuse anger, harshness, and abuse, and it will not carry that weight. The verse itself makes love the criterion, so conduct driven by rage is disqualified by the sentence being quoted, not merely by something outside it. Proverbs sets correction inside a father's delight (3:11–12), and the New Testament states the limit directly to parents: do not provoke your children to wrath (Ephesians 6:4), do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged (Colossians 3:21). A parent's anger is not correction, and violence that injures a child is not what this book commends. If reading this verse makes anyone feel licensed, they have read it backward.
And it is not a parenting manual or a guarantee. Read the other way, the verse gets dismissed as merely ancient and the duty gets discarded along with the era's instrument. The wisdom underneath outlives the setting: a parent who cannot bear to correct is not sparing the child but transferring the cost to the child's future. This is a formation pattern entrusted to loving judgment, and households and eras apply it differently. Proverbs never reduces raising a person to a technique, and 22:6 is a pattern too, not a promise.
From this side of the cross
Hebrews takes this same instinct and locates it in God's own fathering, saying that discipline is unpleasant at the time and "afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it" (12:11), and that God does it "for our profit." What that passage establishes is the direction of the whole thing. Correction in Scripture is aimed at a person's good by someone committed to them, which is the only frame in which this proverb makes sense, and any use of it outside that frame has left the text behind.
Related: Proverbs 23:13–14 · Proverbs 3:11–12 · Ephesians 6:4 · Colossians 3:21 · Hebrews 12:9–11 · Proverbs 22:6
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.