Home Love for Children

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 16, 1915

Home Love for Children

“How can parents best make their children care more to be at home than to be anywhere else?”

This is a big question, a hundred-sided question, a volume, were it fully answered. Make the home interesting by giving the children plenty to do in it and about it. Children need work, regular, important, purposeful work, more work than play. They need play, but they need work—tasks, chores, duties that give zest to play when playtime comes—that keeps time stepping lively and crowds the day. Move into the country with your boys. Give one the chickens; another, the calf; another, the yard and woodpile. There is virtue in kindling. If your boys are girls, dismiss the maid and let the daughters cook, set table, sweep, dust, anything, so long as they work. “Why, father,” said one of my boys the other night, “most of the boys don’t go home after school till supper time. They haven’t anything to go home to, nothing to do, no place to go except the street.”

The day isn’t long enough for my boys. Home is the most fascinating spot on the globe, with all their chores, the live creatures to be fed and loved, the out-loud reading, the range of the fields and woods, and the endless work in the garden. A child has a moral right to be born and set free in the country, where home is not a flat, nor a number, nor a sidewalk. Give the child a home.—Home Progress.