Encourage Your Children

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jan 27, 1876

Encourage Your Children.

At times it is necessary to punish, but very much more may be done by encouraging children when they do well. Be, therefore, more careful to express your approbation of good conduct than your disapprobation of bad. Nothing can more discourage a child than a spirit of incessant fault-finding on the part of its parents; hardly anything can exert a more injurious influence upon the disposition both of the parent and child. There are two great motives influencing human action—hope and fear. Both of these are at times necessary. But who would not prefer to have her child influenced to good conduct by a desire of pleasing rather than by the fear of offending? If a mother never expresses her gratification when her children do well, and is always censuring them when she sees any thing amiss, they are discouraged and unhappy, their dispositions become hardened and soured by this ceaseless fretting, and at last, finding that whether they do well or ill, they are equally found fault with, they relinquish all efforts to please and become heedless of reproaches.