Training Your Children Early

Sometimes, it's hard as a mother, to be consistent when training our children. I find that it's harder for me personally to follow through when I'm tired. However, I know it's an important part of my job and I know I need to stay on top of it. 


Here are some insightful comments from a 19th century magazine.

photo credit: Peter Heilmann

There is no such thing as an entirely good or an entirely bad man or woman in the world. In all there is a mixture of both good and evil, which is partly the result of natural instincts and partly of training

People often talk as if children were naturally good, which I believe to be utter nonsense. They are innocent and pure, for when they start in life they have had no opportunity to be otherwise, but all the same there is latent in their hearts the germs of both good and evil. 


Now it is the mother's part to help her child to cultivate the good and to root out the evil, and this is best done by careful discipline and training in its first ten years of life; after that the task is harder.

The old saying that “the child is the father to the man” is most true. The faults that the man has now, and which lead him to forgery, drunkenness, and revolting cruelty are the result of the growth of little faults of the child. I can imagine the foolish mother of such a man saying years ago when she found him stealing lumps of sugar, or teasing a cat or dog, "He won't do it when he is a little older," and, therefore, leaving him without rebuke or punishment.

Now the mother of such a son, if she possesses a conscience at all, cannot help saying to herself that she herself is to a large extent responsible for her son's evil deeds, for had she disciplined him in his childhood those qualities which have now borne such bitter fruit might have been nipped in the bud.