You and Your Boy by Christine Terhune Herrick

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 6, 1909

You and Your Boy

By Christine Terhune Herrick

I HAVE never been one to feel that the best love was won from a child by extreme indulgence. In fact, I hold that the contrary is the rule. Observing the families of my contemporaries and predecessors, it is borne in upon me that the most indulged children have not been the most devoted to their fathers and mothers. On the contrary, having had the happiness to be associated with several households where strict obedience has always been demanded and received, I feel justified in declaring that the families where discipline is observed are those whose children are most affectionate.

Be it noted that strictness does not mean harshness or severity. It does stand for reasonable rules, positively enforced, for commands which must be obeyed, and, above all, it should stand for justice.

Were I asked to put in a word the most desirable quality in dealing with boys, or with girls, either, for that matter, I would put justice first. It would not be a synonym for hardness, although this is a meaning often applied to it. It would mean obedience to orders and penalties when orders were disobeyed, but it would mean also an appreciation of the child's standpoint, an almost agonizing care that he should not be punished without adequate cause, a rigid adherence to promise of reward as well as of rebuke, an understanding of what led to this or that course of action which from an adult's view-point may seem inexplicable.

There may be well-brought-up children who resent a just punishment. I have never known them. But I have found injustice of reproof or of penalty resented with a bitterness which left its mark for years afterward.—Christine Terhune Herrick.