ARTHUR W. SPAULDING by Arthur W. Spaulding

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 24, 1912

ARTHUR W. SPAULDING

By Arthur W. Spaulding

Come, Let Us Live With Our Children — No. 4

Confidences

ARTHUR W. SPAULDING

The average child is bound to be intimate with some one; it is the parent's right to be that one. It takes time and study and patience to be intimate with one's children. Begin early. Play with the baby; be a boy with the boy, and a girl with the girl. It is worth an hour of romping every day to have your boy come running down the road to welcome you home, to have your little girl climb up into your lap and throw her arms about your neck, and to hear them prattle of the doings of their child-world that day. It is worth the time spent in making a paper balloon, or dressing up clothes-pins for dolls, or building a furnace that will bake real pies,—it is worth that to have your little son and daughter turn to you for help in every emergency. It costs less vital energy to go with them out into the fields and woods and teach them all you know (and then learn more) of birds, and squirrels, and ants, and butterflies, than it takes to be worrying and fretting about what they are learning over at the neighbors'.

If you have a shy child, to make yourself his confidant you have simply a harder and therefore a more delightful problem to solve, and you have the assurance that the results will be more permanent. For the talkative child may tell you his secrets, but he may also tell the neighbors; while, if you get the confidence of the reticent child, you have the honor of being perhaps the sole repository of his secrets. I like to lie with my children on the grass or the floor

or the bed at the close of the day, and give and take talk: if we have been apart, to learn what little simple things of importance the other has been doing; if we have been together, to get farther afield, deeper into the mysteries and the meanings of the things we have seen and heard and thought of.

Be assured, parents, that this giving and getting of confidences is one of the most important things in living with your children. You will have to begin with little things if you mean ever to get big things. There are very few parents who have this blessing. I have met a good many fathers and mothers who thought they knew their children, and yet who did not know a thing of the really important matters; and the unimportant matters they scorned.

It is no small art, this getting and retaining the child's confidence. It requires a subtle mingling of parental cordiality and dignity. A man or a woman must be able to converse delightfully with a child while they are at work together, and at the same time must preserve a demeanor that insures the child's respect. People who are silent with children never will have their confidence; and people who are childish lose the respect of children. You may mark one fact: the parent whose child does not show a preference for his society rather than that of another child or young person, has not the confidence of his child, and does not know so much of what his child is thinking and doing as some other people know.

Let us know what our children and others are talking about together. It is easy, if you are intimate with your children, to hear what Susie Jones or Jimmie Brown told them to-day. Don't despise the unimportant talk. In the prospect of more important information some day, it is highly important to-day to learn that Jimmie caught a two-pound bass with grasshopper bait last Sunday, or that Susie had the greatest fun in dressing up in her mother's red calico wrapper and purple-flowered hat. And don't be too much horrified at iniquities. You may have a decided disapproval of Jimmie's going swimming against his mother's commands, but your son may secretly admire Jimmie's diving, and condone his illegitimate means to reach a legitimate end. You may think it is not nice for a little girl like Susie to tell how she just hates that horrid Smith boy, but your small daughter may be a mild ally of Susie. Then your expressed condemnation may lose you some very important confidences later. It is well for us not to pelt with opinions or dust with platitude, but rather to discuss facts, and wait for questions that will open the way for us to instruct. We need, anyway, to teach more positively and less negatively, more in approval and less in condemnation, more in example than in precept. And if your son and your daughter see no crookedness, no criticizing, no intolerance in you, it is very possible they will choose you rather than Jimmie or Susie for their model. Wait a while, and tell some story that embodies the ideal action; it will be the seed that will sprout by and by.

It is vital that the parent know and guide his child's relation to the sexual life. It is the parent's duty, and his privilege, to induct his child into the knowledge of his bodily functions and the science of life. At a very early age (it varies with the development of the individual) the child should be taught by the father and the mother the simplest facts of his being and the mysteries of his coming into life.

But I do feel it necessary to say, from my experience as a teacher who is also a father, that the menace of sexual immorality is little sensed by the great majority of parents. I know the cases of young boys and girls who have reached depths of depravity which their parents will not credit. Yet they have come to it through comparative innocence, ignorance at least. Their state is due to the blind confidence and neglect of their parents.

I hesitate to say much on the subject, because I have learned that such revelations and appeals serve merely to stir most parents to a futile fever of apprehension and helplessness, which soon reacts in a feeling of greater indifference; whereas what is needed is a calm, persistently vigilant study and action with the children. This matter needs to be made a progressive study in parents' meetings, led by wise and experienced men and women. Do not be deceived; parents may sleep in fancied security, but the devil is ever busy debasing the minds and bodies of children through prurient thoughts and sexual abuse. There is not a child in the land whose parents (or some one as favorably situated) have not instructed and guided him, who is not suffering from a corruption of this holy instinct and power of procreation. The stupidity, the listlessness, and the perversity of children are traceable more fully to this cause than to any other. If there is any danger in life which is designed to be avoided by the parent's possession of his child's confidence, it is this; and from the earliest stages of childhood this campaign for purity must be planned for and worked upon by the father and mother. I say to you, parents, that instead of being a subject to be dreaded, it is a subject the mastery of which gives pleasure in the feeling of power in purity. Nothing in temporal life is more holy than these things; nothing in life is so filled with joy as fatherhood and motherhood; and to be the imparator to your son and your daughter of the knowledge of all this holiness and beauty and joy, to teach them the conservation and the right use of their powers, is itself a joy beyond comparison.

One more thing I say: that this joking about courtship and marriage into which many grown persons, even parents, descend; this sly innuendo of something funnily indelicate in the mutual attraction of young men and young women; this smirking and winking that greet the mention of possible attachments,—I say it is a shame to our profession of Christianity. It is a practise that lowers the lovers' conception of what they are engaged in, that drives them to undue secrecy, deception, and evil, that forbids their applying to their elders for counsel and help at the time when they most need it, and that starts them on the way of making their children a debased and godless generation. The Christian, especially the adult, most of all the parent, who permits himself to think of courtship and marriage in any way that allows lightness and joking about them, commits an offense against heaven and a crime against his fellow men. Let ministers, and teachers, and physicians, and you, fathers and mothers, take high ground in this matter.

Finally, confidence given to the parent by the child in spiritual matters, is the crown of the parent's success. Of old, the father was the priest of the family, the daysman between his children and God. To-day, if although by his weakness he has lost much of this privilege, he may regain it, and to his children he may be the interpreter of God. In this the mother stands with him; and while the father is, by his nature, to be the exemplar and the teacher of the sterner virtues, she, by her intuitive knowledge of the mysteries, her finer spirituality, is to lead her children deep into a knowledge of the love of God.

The spiritual development of the child is not to be forced: “first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.” Fed with the milk of the word, in the stories of the men and women of God, the children are to be brought up by the father and mother to the time of adolescence, when the mind begins to seek for reasons, and the soul is reaching out into the unknown. Then is the psychological time for the final choice and the public confession of Christ. And happy are that father and mother so closely united to their children that in that supreme moment of life their children turn to them for counsel and help.