Advice to a Mother

Christian mother, permit me to offer you a few rules for your daily and prayerful examination :

1. Exercise your authority as seldom as possible, and instead of it employ kind persuasion and deliberate reasoning ; but when you exercise it, make it irresistible.

2. Be careful how you threaten—but never lie. Threaten seldom—hut never fail to execute. The parent who is open-mouthed to threaten, and threatens hastily, but is irresolute to punish, and, when the child is not subdued by the first threat, repeats it half a dozen times with a voice of increasing violence, and with many shakes and twitches of the little culprit, will certainly possess no authority.

3. Avoid tonesand gestures expressive of agitation for trivial matters, indicative of no depravity, and indicating only the heedlessness or'forgetfulness of children, or perhaps nothing more than is common to all young creatures, a love to use their limbs. In all such cases the tones should be kind and persuasive, rather than authoritative; and the severity, and even the gravity of authority, should be reserved exclusively for cases of disobedience, of depravity, or for the prevention of serious evil. A perpetual fretting at children for little things will inevitably harden their hearts, and totally destroy parental authority and influence. There never was a fretting parent who often threatened and never performed, that had a particle of efficient government.

4. Establish the unchanging habit of commanding a child but once. Cost what it may, break the child down to obedience to the first command; and when this is once done, if you are careful never to let disobedience escape punishment of some kind, and punishment that shall be effectual and triumphant, you will find it not difficult to maintain your absolute authority.