Home Politeness in Little Folks.
“True wisdom, early sought and gained,
In age will give thee rest;
Oh! then improve the morn of life,
To make its evening blest.” PARENTS, as soon as your little ones begin to totter about, and speak, say lispingly, “ma,” and “pa,” that very instant teach them courtesy, good manners, to use correct language, chaste, delicate, refined, avoiding everything vulgar, uncouth, clownish, indelicate, or ungrammatical. Even baby lips can be taught refinement, courtesy, politeness of manners, things delicate, tasteful, beautiful, heavenly—the little words “please” and “thank you,” when favors are conferred; and far easier will they learn them than older children. What is termed baby-talk, when addressed to children old enough to understand and imitate it, is detestable. The parents must remember that when the child can comprehend one word its education is begun. The mother, especially, is called to officiate as professor of languages in the domestic university. But who, in teaching a foreigner the English language, would say to him that until he becomes further advanced he must call a horse “horsey,” and a dog a “bow wow,” and that for the present he will address his maternal parent as “mudder”? This seems sufficiently ridiculous; but this is not all—it would be unjust to the learner; it would teach him pronunciations which he must unlearn as laboriously as he learned them. You would thus, in fact, double his task. The folly and injustice are the same when you teach a little child to speak a distorted, mangled, burlesque language, of which it becomes ashamed when older, and tries to unlearn it. Little folks should be taught correct language as early as possible; not a slip of the tongue should pass without correction. We advise all young people to acquire in early life the habit of using good language, both in speaking and in writing, and to abandon forever the use of slang words and phrases, else the unfortunate victim of neglected education is very probably doomed to talk slang for life. The first infantile lisping should be marked with critical precision. Everything vile, vulgar, clownish, impolite, uncouth, ungrammatical, immoral, and all slang phrases, should be sedulously avoided, and all things true, honest, just, pure, lovely, inculcated. All habits, once formed, are formed forever! “Fill first the bushel with the wheat,
With wisdom—food for souls to eat;
Then chaff, the fiction of the day,
Will find no place, and blow away.” Parents, the habits formed now in the hearts of your offspring will be life-long. It was a principle with the old Jesuits—that if they might have the first seven years of a child’s life, they cared not who had the after training. In teaching your children these little sweet courtesies of life, you must repeat over and over the same lessons for the first few years. It requires line upon line, and be not discouraged, even after seventy times repetition. The reward will come at length, and you rejoice to see the little child you have taught so laboriously acting voluntarily on principles you have instilled, requiring no prompting or correction, for courtesy has become habit. In no place is the distinction between the refined and the ill-bred more marked than at the table. If your children are not early taught politeness here, you must prepare yourselves and them for a thousand mortifications in future life, and must look to see them regarded as annoying and disagreeable by those whose good-will you may most desire to secure. “A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.” However humble your position in life, though your family gather about a table of pine instead of mahogany, your children may and should be taught the same lesson of respectful behavior. It is a duty which God requires of you, and he holds you responsible for every unchecked manifestation of disrespect or disobedience you allow in your presence. Let your children learn to sit quietly until all older than themselves are helped, and do not begin compromising the matter with some little insurgent by a lump from the sugar-bowl. If you do, it will by no means be the “beginning of the end.” As they advance in years, encourage them to join pleasantly, but always modestly, in the family conversation around the table. Let the meal-time be one of the most cheerful and heavenly hours of the day. Come to the festive board with something good to communicate, edifying, administering grace to those present—that every thought, word, and deed, may be “apples of gold in pictures of silver.” The table spread with Heaven’s choice bounties is the appropriate place to inculcate order, sobriety, courtesy, politeness of manners, gentlemanly deportment, strict temperance in all things. “The family is a little book,
The children are the leaves,
The parents are the cover that
Protecting beauty gives.”