A Sensible Mother

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 26, 1877

A Sensible Mother.

It is really pitiful to see a good and conscientious mother resolutely shutting herself away from so much that is best and sweetest in her children’s lives, for the sake of tucking their dresses and ruffling their petticoats. How surprised and grieved she will be to find that her boys and girls at sixteen regard “mother” chiefly as a most excellent person to keep shirts 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 too 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 the play-ground, where Mrs. Friendly’s two little girls were playing. “Oh, goody, goody, mamma is coming to play with us!” She was a busy mother, too, and I know 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 let my children grow away from me. I must keep right along with them all the time, and whether it is play with the little ones, or Latin grammar and base ball with the boys, or French dictation with the girls, I must be ‘in it’ as far as I can.”—Scribner for March.