Chapter 72—Parents and Children
I have been shown that while parents who have the fear of God
before them restrain their children, they should study their dispositions
and temperaments, and seek to meet their wants. Some parents attend
carefully to the temporal wants of their children; they kindly and
faithfully nurse them in sickness, and then think their duty done. Here
they mistake. Their work has but just begun. The wants of the mind
should be cared for. It requires skill to apply the proper remedies to
cure a wounded mind. Children have trials just as hard to bear, just as
grievous in character, as those of older persons. Parents themselves
do not feel the same at all times. Their minds are often perplexed.
They labor under mistaken views and feelings. Satan buffets them, and
they yield to his temptations. They speak irritably, and in a manner
to excite wrath in their children, and are sometimes exacting and
fretful. The poor children partake of the same spirit, and the parents
are not prepared to help them, for they were the cause of the trouble.
Sometimes everything seems to go wrong. There is fretfulness all
around, and all have a very miserable, unhappy time. The parents lay
the blame upon their poor children and think them very disobedient
and unruly, the worst children in the world, when the cause of the
disturbance is in themselves.
Some parents raise many a storm by their lack of self-control.
Instead of kindly asking the children to do this or that, they order them
in a scolding tone, and at the same time a censure or reproof is on
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their lips which the children have not merited. Parents, this course
pursued toward your children destroys their cheerfulness and ambition.
They do your bidding, not from love, but because they dare not do
otherwise. Their heart is not in the matter. It is a drudgery, instead of
a pleasure, and this often leads them to forget to follow out all your
directions, which increases your irritation, and makes it still worse for
the children. The faultfinding is repeated, their bad conduct arrayed
before them in glowing colors, until discouragement comes over them,
and they are not particular whether they please or not. A spirit of “I
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