The Horse Trainer’s Method.—The Training Which Develops Talents.—When Child-training Should Begin.—The Training of Her Children the Mother’s All-important Calling.—The Influence of the Mother’s Own Character and Life.—The Children Imitators of their Parents.—Importance of Earliest Training.—Spoiled Children.—Children’s Rights.—The Proper Correction of Children.—Broken Promises and Parental Falsehoods.—Value of Tact in Parental Discipline.—Value of Parental Sympathy.—The Mother, Herself, the Best Gift to Her Children.—The Choice of Books and Stories.—The Choice of Companions for the Children.—Toys, Sports and Amusements.—An Appeal to Mothers.

Molding the Clay.
Within their tiny hands my children hold
A ball of yielding clay,
And, as they try some dainty form to mold,
I hear them softly say,
“What shall we make? an apple or a vase?
Some marbles, or a fan?”
One little boy, a smile upon his face,
Says, “I shall make a man.”
 
Straightway, with lengthened face, he, at his task,
Begins, and ’neath the hands
Unskilful, weak, and yet too proud to ask
For aid, a form expands,
Crude, and yet not too poor to show the man
Hid in the maker’s thought—
How different yet if some skilled artisan
The ball of clay had wrought.
To-day within my hands my children lie,
I shape them as I will,
And seek for aid from Him that is on high,
That He may with His skill
Teach my weak, willing hands to rightly mold
The clay that I have sought,
That in true forms of beauty may unfold
The Maker’s highest thought.
—Transcript.

“I regretted that you had no child, because I thought your heart would not receive that education for heaven which the care of children alone can give. You are surprised perhaps, for you are thinking only of educating your child; but let me tell you that we parents are as much indebted to our children as they to us.”—Anna E. Porter.

“Who is sufficient for these things?”

In a recent magazine article, on the training of horses, I found the following: “The thoroughly competent trainer considers the colt’s individuality and breeding, for upon[247] these depend the measures to be taken to develop the animal into a race-horse. Every good or bad quality in a race-horse is inherited from sire or dam; courage, endurance, extreme speed, action, ability to carry weight, soundness or unsoundness, good or bad temper, all these are matters of inheritance, and must be carefully looked for by the trainer as he develops his horses. The trainer is constantly devising schemes to counteract the faults and to make the best use of the good points of his horses.

“The making of a thoroughbred race-horse cannot be called an exact science. It develops, however, an amount of patience, courage and self-denial that is rarely engendered in callings better understood and more highly esteemed by the general public. The trainer’s life is a hard one and vicarious in the extreme.”

It strikes me that in this we, as parents and teachers, have a grand suggestion in the right training of children. With us a vicarious life would count for the coming generations of the human family.

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” has been invested with a new meaning to me these past few years. It not only[248] means train him up in the correct moral way, reverencing things sacred, respecting father and mother, being a pleasing child, a good son, a law-abiding citizen, a blessing to home and society; but it means as well, train him up in the way he was intended to go, from the endowment of birth, heredity and education. In other words do not warp, from his birth, a mechanic by trying to make a minister of him. Do not try to crowd a farmer into a lawyer’s mold. Do not attempt to train into a carpenter one who is a born artist. Do not force your boys and girls through a literary college, if a bent in some particular direction inclines them toward a technical education. In short, “Train up a child in the way he should go,” as well as in the way he should go.

The mother of the Wesleys was once asked when she should begin to train the little three months’ old baby she held in her arms. “Begin?” she replied, “why I began three months ago.” Her answer was admirable, but she did not place the time sufficiently far back by many months. When our daughters are rightly trained, they will all the way along, from the time that marriage enters their minds, be consciously educating themselves for motherhood, and thus be in a large[249] measure training their little ones even before they are promised.

Does this seem too ideal to our young mothers, and not at all practical? It should not, and I believe will not when it is carefully considered. If any who reads these pages is already anticipating early motherhood they need not be discouraged, for every succeeding child should be better than the one before. Every lesson she learns in the care and training of the first children should but make her the stronger for the duties of future mothering. The trouble too often is that she allows her time and attention to be taken up with less important things, and the fixing of the earlier lessons and learning new and better ones are neglected. In other words, motherhood is not to-day considered her all-important calling, and the little ones suffer from the mothers having fallen too deeply in love with other and less noble things.

All will agree with me, when I say, that we can only with great difficulty train in our children, what we do not know as a part of ourselves. Are you calm and self-possessed? Then you can with little effort teach your children this valuable and telling characteristic. Are you governed by reason and judgment, not impulse? Then you can train[250] your child to this same strength. Are you of even temper? Then you will have little trouble with a stormy-tempered boy or girl. Are you charitable and careful in your speech, and kindly in your judgment of others? Your children are easily led in the same direction.

It is safe to say that only so far as we have travelled ourselves, can we lead our children. True we can point them onward, and tell them of the desirableness of that way to travel in, but their little feet are reluctant to try new paths, unless the parent has tried them before them.

The story of the little son who had without permission followed his father up a steep and dangerous mountain climb, and who at a particularly difficult point in the path, made his presence known, by calling out, “Step carefully, papa, for I am coming in your footsteps,” illustrates just what our example is to our children. Hence I say, Mrs. Wesley did not put the time of her beginning to train her baby, back far enough by many years. Every step in the onward path which she had made in all the years of her own training was but a page in the training she was to give her boys and girls in the after years. “As is the mother so is her daughter,”[251] is God’s truth, although it is many times hard to face.

We desire to train our children to our ideals, and they are ever reaching up to us as their ideals. True, this should spur us on to better things that our example shall be a more worthy copy, but we waste much precious time when we must go to school in mature life to learn the lessons that should have been fixed in our youth.

First, let us remember that a child can be taught more bad habits in its early months than years of training can undo. A methodical, well taught baby becomes a tractable child, as a rule; while a haphazard baby, humored in every whim, becomes a child and adult of the same demands. Have you not often met grown men and women that were just great overgrown spoiled babies? You can read the history of their training, or the lack of it, in their habits, their whims, and their selfishness, through the unmistakable lines these have written on their faces.

Again we must remember that children have rights that we are bound to respect; and unless we do respect them, we can hardly expect them to regard our rights. Another fact is this; that no two children can be trained alike. Each is a study by itself,[252] and each must be studied, if we desire to attain success in the individual case. But few absolute rules can be made; for there must ever be a certain degree of flexibility about every law laid down in the home.

A request is far better than a command, but from the parent it should be regarded with such respect that it equals a command. Also there is a wide difference between a criticism and a kindly correction of a fault. Criticism antagonizes, and arouses the anger of the child, though he may not be old enough to analyze his feelings, yet the spirit of rebellion is there, and leaves its unpleasant results. On the other hand the kindly correction, with love shining all through it, awakens a sorrow for the wrong, and a determination never to repeat it.

“Johnnie, what makes you do so? It does seem to me that you are always doing something you ought not to do.” See the angry flash in little Johnnie’s eye, and the sullen silence as he turns away, with resentment at the wrong done him, written all over his quivering form.

“Johnnie dear, mamma does not like to have her son do so, it is wrong and such things spoil boys and make them grow up in the wrong way. Think of it, son, and see if[253] you would like your life to go in the way that action would lead you.” A tender, sorrowful light comes into the little face and a regret for the sin is expressed and forgiveness sought.

The first manner of correction, if it can be called that, drives your little one away from you, while the second holds him to you, as a traveller is bound to a trusted guide in a dangerous way.

Oh! the sorrow of the falsehoods told to little ones, under the guise of threats that are never realized. In my hearing only a few days ago, in the space of half an hour, a mother told her child—a bright but of course spoiled little boy, not more than three years old, at least a half dozen deliberate falsehoods. I say deliberate, because she knew they were false, and the saddest of all was the fact that the child recognized the untruths as well, and was not moved by them an iota.

Nowhere is there so much tactful wisdom needed as in the mother’s dealings with her little ones. How many times we fail by too great zeal, how many times for not enough. Often, not to notice the little naughtinesses is the wisest thing, when these little wrongs are not positively sinful. Not noticing such[254] wrongs insures their being forgotten sooner, and oftentimes the children are simply imitating in a childish way what they have seen in their elders.

The following incident will illustrate the wisdom of not ............