True Sympathy with Children.
There are many conscientious fathers and mothers, who make themselves and their children miserable, by taking youthful follies too seriously. It is an innate propensity of a child possessed of average good health and spirits to make older people laugh with him; not at him, but at the things that seem amusing to his own sense. And the mother who has the blithe and ready humor to enter into his fun becomes his most fascinating companion. He heeds her rebukes and bends to her correction without ill feeling, where sternness would arouse his pride and ire, for he is assured that she is ready to share all his innocent pranks, and that her disapproval has no foundation in impatience or injustice. And when the day arrives that “childish things are put away,” and the grown men and women look backward to their early home, with what a throb of pleasure they say, when things happen, “Mother would appreciate this; she had the quickest sense of humor of any woman you ever saw!” And underneath these light words is the thought, “How happy that dear mother made me, and how I love her.”—Woman’s Home Companion.