Securing Obedience

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 6, 1908

Securing Obedience

“PAPA,” she cried. He was so absorbed he did not hear. She climbed on his knee and pushed her small, persistent self between the paper and its reader. “Papa,” she said, while she put both her hands on his cheeks, “Papa, won’t you please come outdoors with me and help me find some ‘little stones’? Mama wants them to plant Tinese bulbs in, and she won’t let me go after them down to the river alone. Dere isn’t any round the house but dreat big ones. Come.” The father put down his paper with a smothered sigh of regret, but took the small, plump hand in his own, and allowed it to lead him. Out in the hall, where he was slipping into an overcoat, I heard him discussing the chance of finding

“little stones” as eagerly as if politics and an evening paper did not exist. In fifteen minutes they returned with a basketful of pebbles, which the little maid carried gleefully to her mother. The father returned to his paper.

When he laid it down, I asked, “Why did you leave the newspaper you had been waiting for so eagerly to take Maisie to the river?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said; “that is our method of teaching obedience. If I ask my children to do any small duty, I expect to have it done without a word of demur. To teach obedience, the parent must obey as well as the child. When Maisie asked me to take her to the river, it was a weighty matter to her. I might have told her I was reading my paper and could not stop. That was what I wanted to do. It would not have been a good lesson. A four-year-old child would have remembered if I had turned her away and told her I could not lay down my paper. Perhaps tonight I might find her building a block-house, and tell her it was bedtime. It is disagreeable work to put the blocks away, and toddle upstairs before the tired eyelids begin to grow drowsy. Maisie would do it, though, without a murmur, simply because papa obeys her.

“It is the way we have brought up all the children,” he continued. “Our big boys and girls use judgment, as I do with them. If a task can wait half an hour, till an interesting book is finished or a game of tennis is played, I do not ask it done sooner. The children treat me in the same fashion. They know that when father or mother can possibly do what they wish, if it is reasonable and not selfish, their requests will be granted, and our time given them. There is mutual obedience that makes home a place free of selfishness and jars. It is harder to make little children understand the more convenient season. If Maisie had been ten years older, she would have waited for me to finish the paper before she suggested going to the river-bank. You see it is discipline on both sides of the house.”—Selected.