p. 182 | A SENSIBLE MOTHER

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 21, 1882

A SENSIBLE MOTHER.

It is really pitiful to see a good, conscientious little mother resolutely shutting herself away from so much that is best and sweetest in children's lives, for the sake of tucking the dresses and ruffling their petticoats. How surprised and grieved she will be to find that boys and girls, at sixteen, regard “mother” chiefly as a most excellent person to keep them in order and to make new dresses, and not as one to whom they care to go for social companionship! Yet, before they are snubbed out of it by repeated rebuffs, such as, “Run away, I'm busy to listen to your nonsense,” children naturally go to their mothers with all their sorrows and pleasures; and if “mother” can only enter into all their little plans, how pleased they are! Such a shout of delight as I heard last summer from Mrs. Friendly's two little girls! “Oh, good, goody; mamma is coming to play with me.” She was a busy mother, too, and I knew would have much preferred to use what few moments of recreation she could snatch, for something more interesting than playing with little children. She has often said to me, “I cannot see my children grow away from me; I must be right along with them all the time.”—Selected.