p. 8 | Look for the Mother by J. L. Harbour

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 23, 1911

Look for the Mother

By J. L. Harbour

A COMPANY of men and women at a dinner-party were discussing the achievements of an unusually brilliant and successful man in the city, and at last one of the men said, “He must have had a wise and devoted mother.”

“Necessarily?” asked one of the men.

“I think so. One must usually look for the mother in the achievements of the successful men of the world. I have proved this to be true in many instances.”

Others will find it to be true if they care to “look for the mother” in the early lives of the most successful men of the world. Uneducated and unskilled in many of the accomplishments of life the mother may have been, but her own shortcomings in this respect made her all the more ambitious for her son, and it

was her wise training and self-sacrifice that helped to form the boy character and cultivate the boy mind. Some one of clear insight has written: “The mother who reads and studies with her son all through childhood and boyhood has literally formed the mind that was given her, and made of herself a memory, a standard, and a power for all of her son’s future development. That mother who satisfies herself with feeding, dressing, and sheltering a child, does no more than an animal; and whatever relation rests upon an animal basis is quickly perishable. Clothes and cleanliness are necessary and excellent; but any worthy book read aloud with your son, and accompanied by exchange of comment and thought, is worth a hundred sets of clothes.”

One looks for the mother in vain when the mother has done nothing in the mental, moral, and spiritual development of the man, when she has been nothing but the household drudge that too many mothers allow themselves to become. One must “look to the father” for much that is excellent in the physical development of the boy, and the father should share with the mother in the mental and spiritual and intellectual development of the boy. It is ideal when one can say, “Look to the father and the mother,” in the children who have gone out into the world to make names for themselves, and do the work that only strong men and women can do.

— J. L. Harbour, in American Motherhood.