Ideals and Their Value to the Parent and the Child

Dear Reader,

Good Monday to you! We hope that your weekend was both restful and well-spent. Thank you for taking the time to visit us, and for all your comments and support. They mean so much.

We would like to share with you a little article from the "Mother's Magazine," February 1909, which struck a chord, so to speak, with our little family. It seems that slander and gossip are standard fare in our society, and we strive to keep our home free from this pernicious habit. This article puts so beautifully forth the argument of striving to be above such things, that we have typed it in its entirety. May it bless your family.

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Ideals and Their Value to the Parent and Child

by R. A. White

It may seem a trivial use of a word which expresses so much, but it surely is using it as a lever to uplift human nature if, in a child's heart, can be planted some germ of attainment in opposition to its natural weakness; thus if, in a very nervous and timid child, the ideal of courage and fearlessness, of calmness in emergency, can be fostered and cultivated until it becomes his chief desire to attain something represents to us highest endeavor.

To set before its mind a point which, if gained, confers on life its laurel wreath, is worth a thousandfold more than the study for which he may have struggled to bring home a maximum mark of approval.

To set about ridding one's home from the pest of slander and gossip may seem a small ambition, but let her who has determined that, under this flag, she will fight for one ideal point in her family life, be assured that she has turned into a path which it will take unremitting effort to tread. Should she be able to live up to her purpose, she has attained much. I know of but one household "Safe as altar e'en to foe," and of only one woman of whom her children can say, "I never heard my mother speak evil of anyone, and she never lets us talk gossip at our table."

To make our mealtimes hours of refreshment, in which the mind gains more than the body, is not an unworthy point of endeavor.

Could we take the testimony of a hundred heads of families, around whose tables the bright, eager, widely differing personalities of their children gather, we should find that argument and not conversation was the rule; that in at least half the households no endeavor was made to set self aside and devote these brief times of meeting to enjoyment and cheerful intercourse.

Where a father and mother have decided that under their roof this end is to be attained, they have set themselves a task to which they will unceasingly have to bend themselves with strenuous effort.

The father has to lay aside the weight of the day's troubles and fatigue, the mother to forget her vexations and disappointments, and the children from the earliest years learn to keep out of sight their differences and disputes. Reproof must wait other opportunity and discontent keep silence.

Ideals Worth Striving For.

It may be straining the ordinary use of ideal to put it among the things real and attainable, but there is no other word by which to indicate that which, being uplifted and above the common, is yet worth striving for, because it is attainable, and when reached, unspeakably precious.

We realize easily the poetic or artistic ideal, but to seek such influences in our own lives within the "trivial round and daily task," to which everybody call us, is not common, though through it the world would grow fast into a sweeter dwelling-place, and our nation and our generation would bear priceless fruit.

The beginning and the ending of married life without some such conserving, developing aim in the heads of the household, and transmitted through them to their children, are almost equally sad. A purpose, a definite aim, beyond the level of social success and material development, or even of intellectual attainment, is absolutely necessary to a perfect home life.

One does not mind a bruise or a stumble when the path leads always upward, and the wear and stress of the years only act as refiners. But to begin life together solely to live, to eat and drink and take what time sends, makes of every failure a wound, of every mistake a sore.

To end it, with a consciousness that out of the house has gone no added strength to the cause of good against evil, that the contribution of our lives to our time has been only to increase its craving for what is material and selfish, is to have "sown the tempest and reap the whirlwind." Nothing remains to us but regret.

We seem destined by our origin to be a nation of idealists; the whole sweep of possible good is our horizon. to what have we contracted that fair margin? Where is the brother hood of man, where the delicate simplicity of womanhood? Where is the readiness to live without debilitating luxury, the eagerness to enrich mankind?

Only through our homes can we give back to the world the hope planted by our forefathers in the minds of mankind. Let it be less a matter that our boys receive scholastic honors than that they know the value of mone as a trust and a means of living honestly and doing good. Let it be that athletic triumphs are small affairs beside the struggle for rectitude and to conquer a besettting sin.

Let our girls learn that their heritage of beauty frees them from the vulgar means of lavish display, and that it is permitted them in their untitled simplicity to emulate the noblest of women gone before and to establish a method of life exalting to their sex, without imitation of the convention usage or the splendor of articial rank.

Into the heart of the fair-haired girl upon her mother's knee can be dropped such pregnant seed of ideal motherhood as, once accepted as a responsibility, shall give to her generation a true benefaction. Into the romping boy, alive in every muscle and sinew with impatient strength, can be infused such sense of honorable manhood that he would not dishonor it.

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Love,

Marqueta