Neglect

“ And equally in your power is it to neglect your child. By suffering pleasure to lure you—by following the follies of fashion, or by the charm of those baubles which the world presents to the eye, but keeps from your grasp—you may neglect your child. ”

“ Shall the world and its pleasures draw off your attention from your duty when so much is at stake? or, will you leave your child to glean knowledge as best it can, thus imbibing all principles and all habits, most of them unwholesome, and many poisonous? You can decide—you, the mother. You gave it life, you may make that life a blessing or a curse, as you inculcate good or evil; for if through your neglect, or through bad example, you let evil passions obtain an ascendency, that child may grow into a dissolute and immoral man ”

“ The dust of many day’s neglect has gathered thick upon its lids. Oh, Christian parents, when you thus close up the wells of salvation by the trash of degenerate taste and vitiated morals, you are despising the testimonies of the Lord, and leading your children step by step to the verge of destruction. ”

“ You had an opportunity this year to have ministered to the wants of the poor widow, the orphan, the sick, the afflicted and distressed, but these opportunities are now gone, and gone forever. If neglected, there is no remedy; that neglect remains forever. ”

“ Thou canst trim thy body, and spend many a minute at the glass; dost thou not care for thy soul? How long thou takest to decorate thy poor flesh, which is but worm's meat, or would be in a minute if God took away thy breath! And yet all the while thy soul is uncombed, unwashed, unclad, a poor neglected thing. Oh it should not be so. You take care of the worse part and leave the better to perish through neglect. ”

“ The mother who neglects her child in the eager pursuit of some phantom of pleasure, or for the attainment of ease, will make that child unhappy, and herself doubly so; for she can no more expel from her mind a consciousness of having wronged that child, than she can prevent being disturbed by the evidences of her neglect. ”

“ This disproportionate concentration of feeling on the individual child, and neglect of the child in general, produces a world full of people with a congested family life, full of morbid sensitiveness and potential difficulty and suffering, and a weak, anæmic social life, full of mutual neglect and dereliction of duty. ”

“ And what parent so insensible as not to feel those thorns and nettles in the untoward disposition of his neglected child? It may be, he is indifferent about the culture of the tender mind but he will often be chagrined with the sad consequences of that indifference. He may not sufficiently feel the importance of religious instruction; but the neglect of it will prove to him a fruitful source of inquietude and pain. The thorns and thistles will not gall him the less that lie is unwilling to acknowledge them the growth of his own negligence. ”

“ I would recommend it to them not only to endeavour to remove the religious objections which weak minds may have to this salutary practice, but to enjoin it as a duty, and to point out the danger of neglecting to make use of a mean which Providence has put in our power for saving the lives of our offspring. Surely such parents as wilfully neglect the means of saving their children’s lives, are as guilty as those who put them to death. ”

“ When a parent sends you a pupil, who, in consequence of neglect or mismanagement, at home, has become wild and ungovernable, and full of all sorts of wickedness, he has no right to expect, that you shall turn your attention away from the wide field, which, in your whole school-room, lies before you, to spend your time, and exhaust your spirits and strength, in endeavoring to repair the injuries which his own neglect has occasioned. ”

“ Nor were they ignorant what a bulwark of defence is raised by education and by the example of parents—a fact which many unhappy parents either know not or are careless of, and hence by their neglect they become the cause of the eternal ruin of their children. ”

“ Children, in too many instances, are looked on as anything but a blessing; they are treated as incumbrances, or worse; and the neglect in which they are brought up, renders it almost impossible for them, when they grow older, to know anything properly of moral or social duties. ”

“ After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. ”

“ Hence it happens, that because a Woman of the first Rank does not deign to suckle her Child, the Neglect descends to almost the lowest Rank; and many Men whose Figure in Life is very inconsiderable, scorn to bear the Noise of a Child, tho’ their own Flesh and Blood, only because it is a Practice among their Betters to remove them. And hence too the Great have two Reflections to make on this Point, the Duty they owe to their Children, and, (tho’ perhaps it is not a proper Observation here) the Influence which a Neglect of this Duty has on all beneath them. ”

“ A careless management of this function, at any period of life during its existence, is apt to be followed by consequences that may be serious; but a neglect of it during the epoch of development, that is, from the age of fourteen to eighteen or twenty, not only produces great evil at the time of the neglect, but leaves a large legacy of evil to the future. ”

“ Since this care is needful to the life of children, to neglect them is to murder them; again, to give them up to be managed by those people who have none of that needful affection placed by nature in them, is to neglect them in the highest degree; nay, in some it goes farther, and is in order to their being lost; so that 'tis an intentional murder, whether the child lives or dies. ”

“ It will be better for thee, and for thy children after thee. All neglect, carelessness, slurring over work, is a sin; a sin against God, who has called us to our work; a sin against our country and our neighbours, who ought to profit by our work; and a sin against ourselves also, for we (as I shall shew you soon) ought to be made wiser and better men by our work. ”

“ When men are ill, they feel every neglect with double anguish, and, what then must be in such cases the feelings of women, whose ordinary feelings are so much more acute than those of men; what must be their feelings in case of neglect in illness, and especially if the neglect come from the husband! ”

“ That almost one half of the human species perish in infancy, by improper management or neglect. This reflection has made me often wish to be the happy instrument of alleviating the miseries of those suffering innocents, or of rescuing them from an untimely grave. ”

“ Teach your children in their youth, and you will have a quiet old age. Look after their bodily cleanliness, and keep them from all sin, like the apple of your eye and your own souls. If the children transgress through the neglect of their parents, the parents will answer for these sins on the day of the terrible judgment. ”

“ To find that the symptom has a purpose rather than a cause gives the indication for the treatment. Judicious neglect causes the symptom to cease by defeating its very purpose,—that of drawing attention to itself. ”

“ Christian mothers reproach themselves with neglecting their duty to their children if they do not constantly interfere with their movements, but they forget that in points of physical education Nature herself is such an excellent teacher that the apparent neglect is really a transfer of the pupil to a more efficient school. 2. The Nostrum Fallacy.—When a child complains of headache, lassitude, or want of appetite, the nurse concludes that he must "take something." ”

“ When we remember that the majority of cases which fill their wards are cases of more or less directly preventible diseases, the fruits of our social neglect, too often of our neglect of the sufferers themselves, too often also our neglect of their parents and forefathers ”

“ Before we talk of equality of pain, which is, in nine cases out often, only a selfish and indolent excuse for neglect, let us contrast a high and a low position together. On one side is protection, instruction, and pleasure; on the other is neglect, ignorance and hardship. Here, wants are invented to become luxuries ”

“ I do not believe there is in our beautiful but distracted country a single person who is the subject of so cold-blooded, unprovoked, systematic, malignant neglect and abuse on any one point as the writer of these short and simple annals on this. ”

“ Then, when we consider the pains which they endure for us, and the large share of all the anxious parental cares that fall to their lot; when we consider their devotion to us, and how unshaken their affection remains in our ailments, even though the most tedious and disgusting; when we consider the offices that they perform, and cheerfully perform, for us, when, were we left to one another, we should perish from neglect; when we consider their devotion to their children, how evidently they love them better, in numerous instances, than their own lives ”

“ It is believed that in these respects we have cause to charge ourselves with too little attention to their spiritual interest, and as though they were an inferior class of beings, they have too often been treated with unwarrantable neglect. It is to be feared that their loss of confidence in us, and the consequent measures which many of them have pursued, may, in a considerable degree, be traced to our neglect as the cause. ”

“ For not only in the lower class, but in the middle and upper classes, when one sees an unhealthy family, then in three cases out of four, if one will take time, trouble, and care enough, one can, with the help of the doctor, who has been attending them, run the evil home to a very different cause than the will of God; and that is, to stupid neglect, stupid ignorance, or what is just as bad, stupid indulgence. ”

“ But it is not well that all this should, from infancy, be daily talked out before the child, and he grow up in egotism from moving in a sphere where everything from first to last is calculated and arranged with reference to himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect combined with real care and never ceasing watchfulness has often seemed to do wonders in this work of setting human beings on their own feet for the life journey. ”

“ That, until a child is grown to an age to judge for itself, the parents will be held responsible for their stewardship of its body and soul at the great tribunal of God does not strike them, and it is only perhaps when the boomerang of their neglect has returned to them and blasted them with calamity that they become conscious of their past negligence. ”

“ What child of four years of age was ever capable of such an act, without a long course of preparation? for neglect is preparation. Both were murderers, and their parents were their teachers. If "the child is father of the man," what is to become of such children? ”

“ Set against the poor, mind you. Not merely set away from the poor, so as to neglect or lose sight of them, but set against, so as to afflict and destroy them. This is the main point I want to fix. your attention upon. You will often hear sermons about neglect or carelessness of the poor. But neglect and carelessness are not at all the points. ”

“ The most serious result of our neglect in this particular is that our children pass through life with the most meagre knowledge of the proper way in which to meet accidents of all sorts, for where they are not taught during [Pg 224] their school days they, for the most part, remain ignorant of matters of this kind throughout their maturer years. ”

“ A kind Providence, whose hand is visible even here, mercifully provides that the almost inevitable decay and death which man’s criminal neglect entails on the offspring of the unfortunate who dwell in these dreary mansions, shall elicit comparatively feeble pangs of parental anguish. ”

“ Instead, hundreds of thousands of children each year suffer abuse and neglect, most often at the hands of their own parents or other family members. The horrors of physical or emotional trauma deny these young people their childhood, and our abused children carry the psychological scars of their mistreatment throughout their lives. ”

“ Though the pains which the care of many children entail on a mother form a considerable set-off from the pleasures secured by them to her children and herself, yet the miseries immediate and remote, which neglect would entail, so far exceed them that submission to such pains up to the limit of physical ability to bear them becomes morally imperative as being the least wrong. ”

“ It may be difficult to say whether children are oftener destroyed by over-tenderness than by neglect, and the evils incident to poverty. Both extremes are common; while the happy medium—that of conducting a child's education upon the principles of physiology, is rarely known, and still more rarely followed. ”

“ Still further, modern scientific research has discovered the specific training fault which, more than anything else, accounts for the failure in adaptation. Stated briefly, this fault consists in neglect to develop moral and emotional control during the first years of life. ”

“ the neglect whereof is one of the most general defects among the scholars of this kingdom, who seem not to have the least conception of a style, but run on in a flat kind of phraseology, often mingled with barbarous terms and expressions, peculiar to the nation: Neither do I perceive that any person, either finds or acknowledges his wants upon this head, or in the least desires to have them supplied. ”