Wordsworth begins his poem by stating how his "heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky", and how it did this when he was a child too, and it will when he is old. So what he means by the quote "The Child is father of the Man" is simply that as a child, he felt the same awe and respect for nature that he does as a man, and how the child, in its simplicity and innocence, is often wiser than the man, and can teach the man a few things, like a father.
A major theme of a lot of Worsdworth's poetry is the beauty of childhood-he thinks that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy!", that we are closer to wisdom and God when a child than when an adult. As an adult, we don't still have that awe and reverence that children do, "The things which I have seen I now can see no more" and the world ruins us. So Wordsworth feels that the child, having more wisdom and being closer to God, can be the greater teacher, or father, to the man. I provided links to another Wordsworth poem that follows this theme also ("Ode: Intimations of Immortality").
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