To Parents of Children by A Father

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California, U. S. A. · Nov 11, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 44.

To Parents of Children

By A Father

I WILL venture, as a parent of six, to make these simple suggestions, with apologies for their dogmatic form, to any fellow parents or others in charge of children, who may read these lines.

1. Make friends with your children, finding out, by careful experiment, how to be both leader and comrade. As they grow up, your relationship with them should include the element of happy, trustful, confiding friendship.

2. Help them to think for themselves, and try to train them to be self-reliant and resourceful. Don't be too eager to do things for them that they had much better learn to do for themselves. Whether it is putting their clothes tidy, keeping their lesson books in order, doing their little bit of garden, feeding the chickens, mending a toy boat or a bicycle tire,—whatever it is, suggest to them it ought to be done, encourage them to do it, show them how, but don't do it for them!

3. You cannot begin too early to tell them about God and Christ and the world and themselves. The most valuable thing that Christian fathers and Christian mothers can give their children, by wise methods and in suitable ways, is what they themselves have of Jesus Christ. From their earliest days teach them how to seek and to find God in prayer, in the Bible, in nature, and in the men and women all around them. What they become in later years depends, to an almost terrifying degree, on what you write on the white pages of their receptive child minds.

4. Nevertheless, what gets written on that page depends, in the long run, less on what you say to them than on what you are and what you do. If they see you, their father and mother, make a point of telling God about everything, they will want to do the same. If they see any Christlike unselfishness in you, they will copy it, unconsciously and instinctively. If they see you subordinating money and comfort and ease to the claims of the poor and needy in body and soul, that will be for them a beacon light in finding their vocations and shaping their careers. And the consciousness that they watch you thus will prove a very powerful motive to make each of you a better Christian. Indeed, you can hardly meet their eyes if you get slack.—A Father.