MANAGEMENT OF CHILDREN
Bishop Paine, of the Southern Methodist Church said at Alexandria “Give him the children of a town for five years, and he would take the town.” “The child,” says Wordsworth, “is father of the man.”
The instruction of your children cannot commence too early. Every mother is capable of teaching her children obedience, humility, cleanliness and propriety of behavior; and it is a delightful circumstance, that the first instruction should thus be communicated by so tender a teacher. It is by combining affectionate gentleness in granting what is right, with judicious refusal of what is improper, that the happiness of children is promoted, and that good and orderly habits are established. If children are early trained to be docile and obedient, the future task of guiding them aright will be comparatively easy.
Do all in your power to teach your children self-government. If a child is passionate, teach him by gentle and patient means, to curb his temper. If he is greedy, cultivate liberality in him. If he is sulky, charm him out of it by encouraging frank, good humor. If he is indolent, accustom him to exertion. If pride makes his obedience reluctant, subdue him by counsel or discipline. In short, give your children a habit of overcoming their besetting sin.
In all your teaching do not forget the most important of lessons.— Teach to love, so that when your eyes are old, and their sense almost extinguished, you may yet find round your sick couch and dying bed no greedy covetous looks, but anxious weeping eyes, which strive to warm your freezing life, and lighten the darkness of your last hour by thanks for their first; teach to love, I repeat; that means—do you love!
The very handling of the nursery is significant, and the petulance, the passion, the gentleness, the tranquility indicated by it, are all reproduced in the child. His soul is a purely receptive nature and that for a considerable period, without choice or selection. A little farther on, he begins voluntarily to copy everything he sees. Voice, manner, gait, everything which the eye sees, the mimic instinct delights to act over. And thus we have a whole generation of future men receiving from us their very beginnings, and the deepest impulses of their life and immortality. They watch us every moment, in the family, before the hearth, and at the table; and when we are meaning them no good or evil, when we are conscious of exerting no influence over them, they are drawing from us impressions and molds of habit, winch, if wrong, no heavenly discipline can wholly remove; or, if right, no bad associations utterly dissipate. Now, it may be doubted, I think, whether, in all the active influence of our lives, we do as much to shape the destiny of our fellow men, as we do in this single article of unconscious influence over children.
Be ever gentle with the children that God has given to you; reprove them earnestly, but never in anger. In the forcible language of Scripture “Be not bitter against them.” “Yes, they are good children,” I once heard a kind parent say, “I talk to them much, but I don’t like to beat my children, the world will beat them.” It was a beautiful thought, yet there is not one child that comes round your table, hearty as they now look, on whose head, if long spared, the storm will not beat. Adversity may wither them, sickness fade, a cold world frown on them; but amid all, let memory carry them back to a home where the law of kindness reigned, where the mother’s reproving eye was moistened with a tear, and a father’s frown was more in sorrow than in anger.
Be patient with the little ones. Let neither their slow understanding nor occasional pertness offend you to provoke the sharp reproof. Remember the world is new to them, and they have no slight task to grasp with their unripened intellect the mass of facts and truths that crowd upon their attention. You are grown to maturity and strength, through years of experience; and it ill becomes you to fret at a child who fails to keep pace with your thought. Teach him patiently as God teaches you “line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, and there a little.” Cheer him on in his conflict of mind, in after years his ripe, rich thought shall rise and call you blessed.
Bide patiently the endless questionings of your children. Do not roughly crush the rising spirit of free inquiry with an impatient word or frown, nor attempt on the contrary, a long instructive reply to every casual question. Seek rather to deepen their curiosity. Convert if possible, the careless question into a profound and earnest inquiry. Let your reply send the little questioner forth, not so much proud of what he has learned, as anxious to know more. Happy, thou, if, in giving your child the molehill of truth he asks for, you can whet his curiosity with a glimpse of the mountain of truth lying beyond; so wilt thou send forth a philosopher, and not a silly pedant into the world.
Bear patiently the childish humors of those little ones. They are but the untutored pleadings of the young spirit for care ard cultivation. Irritated into strength, and hardened into habits, they will haunt the whole life like fiends of despair, and make the little ones curse the day they were born; but corrected kindly and patiently, they become elements of happiness and usefulness. Passions are but fires, they may either scorch us with their uncontrolled fury, or may yield us a genial and needful warmth.
Bless your little ones with a patient care of their childhood, and they will certainly consecrate the glory and grace of their manhood to your service. Sow in their hearts the seeds of a perennial blessedness; its ripened fruit will afford you a perpetual joy. Send your little child to bed happy. Whatever cares press, give it a warm good night kiss as it goes to its pillow. The memory of this in the stormy years which fate may have in store for the little one, will be like Bethlehem’s star to the bewildered shepherds.
Harshness and severity used without caution is calculated either to injure the dignity and independent spirit of the child, or produce a morbid obstinacy and perverseness. It is at times necessary to censure and punish but very much more may be done by encouraging children when they do well. Be, therefore, more careful to express your approbation of good conduct than your disapprobation of bad. Nothing can more discourage a child than a spirit of incessant fault finding on the part of its parent; and hardly anything can exert a more injurious influence upon the disposition both of the parent and child. There are two great motives influencing human action—hope and fear. Both of these are at times necessary. But who would not prefer to have her child influenced to good conduct by a desire of pleasing rather than by the fear of offending? If a mother never expresses her gratification when her children do well and is always censuring them when she sees anything amiss, they are discouraged and unhappy; their dispositions become hardened and soured by this ceaseless fretting; and last, finding that, whether they do well or ill, they are equally found fault with, they relinquish all efforts to please and be come heedless of reproaches.
The day for sternness of family discipline is passed; but the day of thorough respectfulness among its members and a careful propriety will never pass. Play with your children as much as you please, but keep the reins of your authority steadily drawn.
Some dangerous theorists hold that vehemence of passion proves strength of feeling; that people of warm tempers have necessarily warm affections; and that a boy’s spirit should not be broken. They never consider that a burst of passion is neither more nor less than a burst of selfishness, and that the individual who does more injury in one hour of anger than he could undo, perhaps in years of willing toil, is likely to make his friends wish that his feelings had only the usual and average strength of their own, and that his spirit had been curbed only by his reason.
The eldest son of President Edwards, congratulating a friend on having a fine family of sons, said to him with much earnestness, “Remember there is but one mode of family government. I have brought up and educated fourteen boys, two of whom I brought, or rather suffered to grow up without the rod. One of those was my youngest brother, and the other Aaron Burr, my sister’s only son,” both of whom had lost their parents in their childhood; “and from both my observation and experience, I tell you, sir, maple sugar government will never answer. Beware how you let the first act of disobedience in your little boys go unnoticed, and unless evidence of repentance be manifest, unpunished.” Of all the sermons I ever heard, long or short, this has been the most useful, so far as this world is concerned. It is a solemn lesson, to be prayerfully pondered by all pa rents and guardians. The Bible lays down four great rules, involving the four great elements of the successful religious training of children —prayer, instruction, example, and restraint. And it is useless to pray for, or with your children, if you do not instruct them; and it will be in vain to instruct them if your example contradicts your teaching; and in vain will be the prayer, the instruction, the example, if, like Eli, when your children do wrong, you “restrain them not.”
It is related of the mother of Gen. Schuyler, that she was indulgent, but a firm disciplinarian, and she never allowed her authority to be questioned by her children. The General frequently mentioned an illustrative example that occurred when he was about ten years of age. On one occasion, not satisfied with some food that was set before him at dinner, he refused to eat it, and asked for another dish. His mother, regarding his dislike as whimsical, ordered a servant, to carry the dish away, and nothing else was given him. At supper the same dish was set before him, and it was again refused. He went to bed fasting, and the next morning the same dish was given him for breakfast. All this while his mother had not uttered a word of reproof, nor exhibited the least unkindness of manner. Hunger had subdued his rebellious spirit, and conscience made him penitent. He ate the obnoxious food, cheerfully begged his mother to forgive him for his obstinacy, and resolved never again to defy her authority. This, kind of maternal discipline had a powerful effect and was reproduced in the character of the son in an eminent degree.
Says Dr. Edward Lawton: Many people begin the education of their children with an exhibition of toys, marvelous tales, silly romances, and wind up with the circus and theatre. The degrading influences and sorrowful consequences of this mode of education will be illustrated by stating a few facts that passed under my own observation. So far as my memory goes, about thirty boys educated in this way, i. e., in contempt of all useful knowledge and occupation have spent their, days in reading novels, the lives and confessions of pirates and murderers, &c., and their nights in the streets, dram shops, gambling houses, circus and theatre; at the age of forty-five, one had been hung for murder, one for robbing the mail and three as pirates; five died in the penitentiary, and seven lived and died as useless vagabonds about the streets; three were useful mechanics, and the fate of the remainder is unknown. Of about forty educated with me by a really moral and scientific teacher under the old fogy Puritanical system of restraint as it is now called by Young America, at the age of fifty- five, one was a member of Congress, one Judge of the Supreme Court, three physicians, five lawyers, fourteen were dead, and the remainder farmers and mechanics, and so far as known, not one of them was ever called before the bar of his country on a criminal charge, and they all had comfortable homes, except two or three, and every one was passably respectable.
Keep your children off the street. By that we mean, do not let them make acquaintance on the sidewalks. If they frequent the public schools, you must establish a sort of verbal quarantine at your own door, and examine the youthful tongue once a day, to see if it has not a secretion of slang upon it.
Fathers and mothers, look out for your boys when the shades of evening have gathered around you! Where are they then? Are they at home, at the pleasant, social fireside, or are they running the streets? Are they gaining a street education? If so, take care, the chances of their ruin are many. There is scarcely anything more destructive to their morals than running about at night. Under cover of darkness they acquire the education of crime; they learn to be rowdyish, if not absolutely vicious; they catch up loose talk, they hear sinful thoughts, they see obscene things, they become reckless and riotous. If you would save them from vulgarity, save them from ruin, save them from prison, see to it that night finds them at home. More than one young man has told the chaplain of the State prison that here was the beginning of his downward course, which finally brought him to the felon’s cell. Let parents solemnly ponder this matter, and do what they can to make home attractive for all the children, so attractive that the boys will prefer it to roaming in the streets. There is no place like home in more sense than one—certainly no place like home for boys in the evening.
Don’t be afraid of a little fun at home, good people. Don’t shut up your house lest the sun should fade your carpets, and your hearts lest a hearty laugh shake down some of the musty old cobwebs there. If you want to ruin your sons let them think that all mirth and social enjoyment must be left on the threshold without when they come home at night. When once a home is regarded as only a place to eat, drink, and sleep in, the work begins that ends in gambling-houses and reckless dissipation. Young people must have fun and relaxation some where; if they do not find it at their own hearthstones it will be sought at other and perhaps less profitable places. Therefore let the fire burn brightly at night and make the homestead delightful with all those little arts that parents so perfectly understand. Don’t repress the buoyant spirits of your children; half an hour of merriment round the lamp and firelight of a home blots out the remembrance of many a care and annoyance during the day, and the best safeguard they can take with them into the world is the unseen influences of a bright little domestic sanctum.
Teach your children the elements of Christian Philosophy, the Bible, lessons of Love, and Temperance, and Knowledge, and Virtue, and Faith, and Hope and Charity, and you may turn them out into the world without a doubt of distrust or fear; they will never injure the State.
Teach your child to take care of himself. Educate your children to activity, to enterprise, to fearlessness in what is right, and to cowardice in what is wrong. Educate them to despise suffering that stands in the way of accomplishment of many aims, and count it as a little thing. Make them free by lifting them up into the storms of life, and not by covering them down with soft and downy plush. Give your children fortune without education, and at least one-half of the number will go down to the tomb of oblivion—perhaps to ruin. Give them an education, and they will be a fortune to themselves and their country. It is an inheritance worth more than gold, for it buys true honor; they can never spend or lose it; and through life it will prove a friend, and in death a consolation.
The father who plunges into business so deeply that he has no leisure for domestic duties and pleasures, and whose only intercourse with his children consists in a brief word of authority, or a surly lamentation over their intolerable expensiveness, is equally to be pitied and to be blain What right has he to devote to other pursuits the time which God has allotted to his children? Nor is it an excuse to say, that he cannot support his family in their present style of living without this effort. I ask, by what right can his family demand to live in a manner which requires him to neglect his most solemn and important duties? Nor is it an excuse to say that he wishes to leave them a competence. Is he under obligation to leave them that competence which he desires? Is it an advantage to be relieved from the necessity of labor? Besides, is money the only desirable bequest which a father can leave to his children? Surely, well cultivated intellects; hearts sensible to domestic affection; the love of parents and brethren, and sisters; a taste for home pleasures; habits of order, regularity, and industry; hatred of vice and vicious men; and a lively sensibility to the excellence of virtue, are as valuable a legacy as an inheritance of property—simple property, purchased by the loss of every habit which would render that property a blessing.
A gentleman was walking over his farm with a friend, exhibiting his crops, herds of cattle, and flocks of sheep, with all of which he was highly pleased, but with nothing so much as with his splendid sheep. He had never seen such noble specimens, and with great earnestness he asked how he had succeeded in raising such flocks. His simple answer was, “I take care of my lambs, sir.” Here was all the secret—he took care of his lambs I Reader—father, mother, teacher—need we make the application.
Training is not merely teaching a child what it ought to do; it is this, and a great deal more. There may be right teaching, which does no good; because, along with it there is a wrong training which does much harm. “Give me some of that,” said a peevish-looking boy about seven or eight years of age, to his mother, who was seated on the deck of a steamer in which I happened to be, lately. The mother had some eatables in her hand. “Hold your tongue, Peter.” replied his mother: “you won’t get it.” “I want that,” again demanded Peter, with increased earn “I tell you,” said the mother, looking at him, “you shall not get it: Is that not enough for you? Go and play, and be a good boy.” “But I want that,” reiterated Peter, beginning to sulk and look displeased. “What a laddie!” exclaimed the mother. “Have I not told you twenty times never to ask a thing when I say that you are not to get it?” “I want that,” cried Peter, more violently than ever, bursting into tears. “Here!’ said his mother, “take it and be quiet. I am sure I never, in all my life, saw such a bad boy.” Alas I poor boy, he had more reason, if he only knew it, to complain of his mother. The same boy, Peter, grows up, probably, to be a selfish and self-willed young man. His mother sees it and suffers from it; but she wonders how such a temper or disposition should show itself in her Peter! and consoles herself with the thought that, whatever is the cause of so mysterious a dispensation, from no fault in her could it have come, nor “for want of telling.”
The eastern proverb which declares that there are no ungrateful children, is nearer the truth than it appears. It is but another version of the Biblical maxim: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. The parent who does really train up a child in the way he should go, is the parent who truly deserve the gratitude of his child, and he is the only parent who can hope to receive it in full measure. How many parents there are who, after indulging their children’s every desire, are sincerely astonished to find them making no return of love and gratitude. Gratitude! For what should they be grateful? For an impaired digestion? For a will uncurbed? For an appetite unregulated? For a heart cold? For a mind empty? For hands unskillful? For a childhood wasted? For the chance of forming a noble character lost? These are poor claims upon the gratitude of a child. Bring up your child so that, at mature age, he has a sound constitution, healthy desires, an honest heart, a well-informed mind, good manners, and a useful calling, and you may rely upon his making you such a rich return of grateful affection as shall a thousand times repay you for the toil and self-denial which such a training costs. No—there are no ungrateful children I It is a hard saying. But is it not true?
A child is never happy from having his own way. Decide for him and he has but one thing to do; set him to please himself, and he is troubled with everything and pleased with nothing.
A spoiled child is an unfortunate victim, who proves the weakness of his parents’ judgment much more forcibly than the strength of their affection. It is the just punishment of a weak over-indulgency that, the more we fondle a spoiled child, the more completely we alienate him from us, as an arrow flies the farther from us, the closer we draw it to our bosom.
I think that the management of children should be regarded and conducted from the following stand-point:
All our thoughts, feelings, and action ought to be arbitrarily ruled by wisdom. Only when this master bears the scepter can we be, good and harmonious beings. The child is not yet unfolded—that is, wisdom has not yet appeared in the center of its soul—therefore it must be governed by this divine sovereign. How can this be accomplished? Having no wisdom yet of its own, the child must be guided by wisdom from abroad; and whence can it emanate if not from parents and teachers? As we obey and must obey our wisdom, so the child must absolutely obey the wisdom of its guardians—the parents and teachers.
Parents and teachers! To you I speak—Labor to make yourselves good, and wise, and harmonious—to become whole men and women— for only then are you able to “manage children.” No system of exterior rules, no compilation of superficial prescriptions, can fix the place of this central rule—this law of laws. The child must learn to obey, strictly and unhesitatingly with an innocent and loving faith in the excellency of his guardian; for only thus will the child be able in riper years, to obey its own unfolded wisdom. Our education most needs obedience. But how can a child, in many cases show obedience—the treatment being so unwise. Therefore, parent, teacher, first cultivate yourselves, and you will become capable without any rules, to “manage children,” and these, rationally managed, will govern themselves afterwards, according to the holy whispers of wisdom.
If you wish your child to follow in the path of truth and virtue, walk in that way yourself. Few parents like to be told of the faults of a child. The reason is obvious. All faults are either hereditary or educational, and in either case to point a finger at the child is, indirectly, to reprove the parent.