I am very much mistaken if the honest keeping and honest
study of such a three days' record would not wholly change the atmosphere
in many a house to what it ought to be, and bring almost constant sunshine
and bliss where now, too often, are storm and misery.
With some parents, although they are neither harsh nor hard in manner, nor
yet unloving in nature, the habitual first impulse seems to be to refuse:
they appear to have a singular obtuseness to the fact that it is, or can
be, of any consequence to a child whether it does or does not do the thing
it desires. Often the refusal is withdrawn on the first symptom of grief
or disappointment on the child's part; a thing which is fatal to all real
control of a child, and almost as unkind as the first unnecessary
denial,--perhaps even more so, as it involves double and treble pains, in
future instances, where there cannot and must not be any giving way to
entreaties. It is doubtless this lack of perception,--akin, one would
think, to color-blindness,--which is at the bottom of this great and
common inhumanity among kind and intelligent fathers and mothers: an
inhumanity so common that it may almost be said to be universal; so common
that, while we are obliged to look on and see our dearest friends guilty
of it, we find it next to impossible to make them understand what we mean
when we make outcry over some of its glaring instances.
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