“AS THE TWIG IS BENT, THE TREE INCLINES.”
By Mrs. H. W. Beecher
Parents often blight or destroy the young lives committed to their care, either by injudicious indulgence or a selfish reluctance to accept the trouble, the restraints, and the cares which inevitably come with helpless infancy. Often, through excessive fondness, they yield implicitly to the unreasonable exactions of beings too young to understand what they need. If, in such cases, wiser friends remonstrate with the parents, in the vain attempt to show them the folly of their indulgence, they are thought unkind or hard-hearted. “Such a darling! How can its mother deny it anything?” But by such an extravagant indulgence you are injuring the child you profess to love so tenderly. You are laying the foundation for a most selfish and disagreeable character, which, sooner than you imagine, will outgrow your control and become your tyrant, causing years of trouble and unhappiness. “Why, this is but a baby! and I think our little ones should have all the liberty and enjoyment possible. It will be time enough to tighten the reins and exercise authority when the child is old enough to discern good and evil.” Ah! that time comes much earlier than parents are willing to believe. It requires but a few weeks for a baby, tiny and undeveloped as it appears to the doting parents, to understand that by persistent crying and violent demonstrations of anger, it will receive all the care and immediate attention it was demanding by these natural signs. Having conquered, the infant becomes sweet and quiet, and soon falls asleep. How long will it be before that little babe will learn that passionate crying will compel the mother to rock it to sleep regularly? That will soon become too monotonous, perhaps, and the incipient tyrant decides that to be walked with is preferable to rocking. A good cry, with kicking and struggling plentifully interspersed, will soon bring the mother to her feet, or the nurse will be called upon to take up the line of march. It will require but two or three such victories before walking will be the only way to coax the child to sleep or into a good-humored condition. If sleep comes at last to relieve the wearied nurse, how softly she creeps to the crib, how stealthily she manages to put the child from her arms on to the well-warmed pillow! That “twig” is rapidly bending in the wrong direction. As the babe grows out of the nurse’s arms, its will, which has never been wisely controlled, is manifested in almost every act; but its little dainty, imperious ways are pronounced “So charming! too ‘cunning’ for anything!” And doubtless they are so, if one looks only to the present, with no foreshadowing of whereunto these “cunning” ways may lead in after-life. It may be laughable, just for once, to see this small specimen of humanity stamp with its small foot, or strike with its pretty, dimpled hand, when denied some article of food, or deprived of something unsafe for it to handle. In a few months the little child enters another stage of child life. That which at twelve months or two years was “so cute!” “so smart!” that the mother had not the heart to check it, was but the beginning of insubordination to parental control, or to trespasses and infringements on the comfort of others, and will fast become intolerable, even in the partial eyes of the parents. Now let them attempt to tighten the reins or exercise proper authority. Will it prove an easy task? Will they succeed in straightening the “twig” which their own folly or neglect has permitted to “bend” so far beyond their reach? Where lies the blame? The mother, who suffered herself to be conquered by an infant’s puny resistance, must answer. The parents, who, later, saw without rebuke or prevention, the small child abuse or tear choice books, destroy valuable articles of furniture, or strike the nurse, or torture menials, without one resolute effort to subdue or teach it better, must appeal to their own consciences to decide this question. They who winked at the child’s youthful misdeeds, proud of its “smartness,” will suffer the most for this wicked indulgence when they see what the little one, so loved and indulged, is fast becoming—ungovernable, insubordinate, impertinent, yielding to no authority that is not brought to bear on it through punishment or force. The “twig,” twisted and bent by over-indulgence or neglect, has become a branch or limb, distorted, unsymmetrical, a disfigurement, not a thing of beauty that should have been a joy forever. A child indulged in every caprice, whose wrong-doings are a source of merriment, and openly repeated as something wonderfully brilliant in the presence of the culprit, must be but little lower than the angels if it does not in a few years bring its parents to grief, and become the torment of the whole household and a nuisance to the neighborhood. We have only space to speak of the great wrong done children by over-fondness and unregulated indulgence; but quite as much harm, of which we have not now time to speak, springs from the heartless neglect of those parents, and particularly the mothers, who, for the pleasures of fashionable life, and their own selfish enjoyments, leave their children to the unsafe guidance and imperfect judgment of hirelings, while they look only to their own ease and pleasure. Such mothers ignore any responsibility, every duty, until at last they are roused to the knowledge that their neglected children are now utterly ungovernable and vicious, going in ways that have every promise of bringing their parents’ gray hairs in sorrow to the grave.—Mrs. H. W. Beecher, in Christian Union.