The Quiet Child

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 3, 1904

We have recently had occasion to observe the ways of a nervous mother, and we feel inclined to echo the sentiments of the lady who said that nervous people have no right to children.

To train a child to sit still and to speak in whispers, and to move about, when at all, very quietly, may be better than allowing it to roam the streets totally unchecked. But isn't it something like breaking a wild song-bird to captivity?

The poor little thing so dreads the bars, and, beating its wings the while, looks at you so piteously with such a mournful light in its soft eyes, and then after a while it ceases to fret, it even knows a dull content—it has grown accustomed to its cage. But, ah! you will miss the wild beauty of its song, the glad pulsations of its breast and wings, the ardor with which it sought to soar when it was free. Restore these, if you can.

A quiet child—a subdued child—a child that never makes any noise—a child which always has before it the fear of its mother's reproof,—it is a pathetic image.

Imagine if you can a boy who never tooted a horn nor played fire-engines; a girl who never romped and ran, never sang, nor whistled for the mere delight of being alive. There are thousands of them, and eternity will not be too long to make up to them for the childhood lost.

Perhaps no one but the unnaturally restrained child himself fully knows the ache and depression of feeling himself different from other children. That difference will separate him from his kind throughout life. If he does not learn comradeship in those early years, he will only never learn it. He will always be a creature apart from the rest of humanity, cut off from it by a gulf never to be bridged. And what if he is better instructed, wiser, more intellectual, generally superior, if with it all he is not happy? The individual who enjoys is more to be envied than he who has learned to despise enjoyment.—Selected.