p. 6 | The Expectant Attitude by Zelia Margaret Walters

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 14, 1912

The Expectant Attitude

By Zelia Margaret Walters

A TEACHER was telling her pupils of a thing that they were forbidden to do. “And if you do,” she finished, and went on to tell the penalty of disobedience.

When the pupils were dismissed, the principal said, gently: “You have provided for disobedience, I see. Do you expect them to disobey you?”

She had expected some of them to disobey her. Did her attitude have anything to do with it? The question set her thinking, as the principal intended it should.

The same question might be suggested to many mothers. I recall one who was sending her eight-year-old son on an errand that necessitated riding on the street-car. She multiplied warnings and admonitions and directions, and after the boy started she exclaimed, “I know he won’t do a single thing I told him to!” And he didn’t. During her talk with him an onlooker could see that with all her emphasis she was throwing herself against the blank wall of the boy’s indifference. She knew he would not heed, he knew that she knew, and it was just so much wasted breath. But how much of his heedlessness was traceable directly to the fact that she did not expect obedience of him? When you hear a mother that expects to be obeyed giving directions to her children, what a different effect it has upon all who hear! It would be a bold child who would disappoint the confident expectation expressed in her tone and manner.

The attitude of the one in authority has everything to do with the child’s obedience. We see it most clearly with the child and his teachers. Most children have only one mother to experiment with in a lifetime, while the teachers are various. To some he yields a prompt, cheerful, loyal obedience; others must fight

for every inch that they carry their authority. But the mother might take her lesson from this: Is she one who receives cheerful obedience, or must she drag the child a protesting captive after her?—Zelia Margaret Walters, in American Motherhood.