BABY HELP by Mrs. F. M. Butts

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 11, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 19.

BABY HELP.

By Mrs. F. M. Butts

“Oo want me, mama?”

In the early morning the voice rang through the house, full of interest and enterprise. Little Nan was three months short of her third birthday, yet she was overflowing with the delightful sense of helping mama. Up and down the stairs she toiled on the make-believe errands that mama invented; or, with a feather duster almost as tall as herself, she dusted furniture already clean; she scrubbed and rubbed and swept, all the time singing at the top of her sweet voice; and if her mother disappeared for a moment, she called out, “Oo want me, mama?”

I was interested in this little house-worker, and her mother’s way of letting her “help,” and all the more, as I had often observed opposite ways. It is very easy for a mother to make a child feel that she is a bother instead of a help; and very common I think for mothers to treat very little children as if they were little animals or something less intelligent; scarcely one in a hundred realizing that education begins almost at birth, and that of all important things it is important that a mother should keep in perfect sympathy with her child. When the baby girl wishes to help, she is told to keep away from this and to get out of that; she gets a slap for soiling her pinafore; a scowl for some other innocent accident belonging to the helping; a cross word for nothing at all except for being a child, and being present when the great god, work, is being sacrificed to.

The little tender heart, as really anxious to serve, as full of good-will, as any grown-up heart, gets its first experience of discouragement, of ingratitude, of unsympathy,—and from its mother. Undoubtedly the mother will wonder six, seven, or eight years hence why the child is so unfeeling, so careless about helping, never noticing when she is worn

out, and in need of help.

If you wish a vine to climb over your trellis, and give you blossom and shade, will you persistently push away its tiny, clinging tendrils? In that case it will climb up some other support, and lavish its young, lovely life in the new direction. A mistake of this kind can never be entirely remedied.—Mrs. F. M. Butts.