Oh! the sweet reasonableness of children when disagreeable
necessities are explained to them, instead of being enforced as arbitrary
tyrannies! She does not make them so feel that she shares all their
sorrows and pleasures that they cannot help being in turn glad when she is
glad, and sorry when she is sorry. She does not so take them into constant
companionship in her interests, each day,--the books, the papers she
reads, the things she sees,--that they learn to hold her as the
representative of much more than nursery discipline, clothes, and bread
and butter. She does not kiss them often enough, put her arms around them,
warm, soften, bathe them in the ineffable sunshine of loving ways. "I
can't imagine why children are so much better with you than with me,"
exclaims such a mother. No, she cannot imagine; and that is the trouble.
If she could, all would be righted. It is quite probable that she is a far
more anxious, self-sacrificing, hard-working mother than the neighbor,
whose children are rosy and frolicking and affectionate and obedient;
while hers are pale and fretful and selfish and sullen.
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