Parentage

“ It may seem wearisome to say so often over that the example of the parents is the chief influence in the training of the child; but how can I help saying it when the fact is so? Is it not true that when the father of a family comes home and talks before his children, every word sinks into their minds? If he talks banter—banter so broad that his elder children laugh and understand, how should the little one on its mother's lap fail to be perplexed and misled? ”

“ But this relation of interdependence is not only for the well-being of the offspring, but for the highest physical, intellectual and moral development and well-being of both parents. Parenthood comes not only to the mother, molding, fashioning and perfecting her in every department of her being, but when intelligently and reverently assumed, when discharged with fidelity and self-denial, it has its priceless endowments for the father as well. ”

“ PARENT, a term of relation applied to those persons from whom we derive our temporal existence.
The moral duties of parents towards their offspring, being a subject not immediately connected with our plan, we shall not enter into any ethical inquiry, but confine our attention to their legal duties; that is, such as they owe to their legitimate children, respecting their maintenance, education, and protection.
1. With regard to their maintenance, it is a principle both of law and nature, that every man is bound to provide for his offspring. ”

“ The child must now be taken into the family councils and find the parents interested in all that interests him. Where this is not done, we have the conditions for the interesting cases of so many youth, who now begin to suspect that father, mother, or both, are not their true parents. ”

“ You must determine whether the mother of your child shall see in you a generous, tender, kingly husband, all-worthy to be the father of her child, and to rule over the empire of her heart, or a mean, merciless tyrant, having no purer or higher aim, in your relations with her, than that of animal indulgence, and whom it is impossible to respect. ”

“ He should say, I will support them who have supported me, I will perform their duties, I will guard their possessions, I will make myself worthy to be their heir, and when they are gone I will pay honour to their memory. And in five ways the parents show their affection for their son. They keep him from vice, they train him in virtue, they provide him with a good education, they unite him to a suitable wife, and in due time make over to him the family heritage. ”

“ Even if clouds obscure the sun, I mean if real and manifest faults on the part of your parents lessen the brightness of their dignity, search for, and behold the sun through the clouds; namely, in spite of your parents' failings, remember their position of authority. God did not say in the fourth commandment: "Honor a good father, a good mother," but simply: "Honor thy father and thy mother."
3. In the preceding chapter I quoted an example of childlike respect for parents which was afforded by an official in a very high position. I will now give you another example. ”

“ Many parents, while indeed quite solicitous according to their lights, for the temporal good of their offspring, training them to a trade or profession, or settling them in marriage, devote but little thought to their spiritual welfare. They dread a vocation in their family as a catastrophe. ”

“ You want to reflect before taking over a family practice, which has been destined for you since you were an infant, in view of which you have been working for five years, and which I have nursed for you, I, your uncle, as if you had been my son? ”

“ I have no parents to love me, as other children have!" Thick tears coursed their rapid way over the rosy cheeks of the deserted foundling.
"Be still, and do not weep, my poor child! [151] You have a Father above,—one who is a Father to us all,—who loves you, and will take care of you." ”

“ Parents should remain parents, children children, for ever, and the great gulf preserved between the two. Honor thy father and thy mother should always be a leading commandment. But this can only take place when father and mother keep their true parental distances, dignity, reserve, and limitation. ”

“ Duty Of Parents To Children. Great are the responsibilities of the husband. Great are the responsibilities of the wife, but greater are the responsibilities of parents. Father and mother, God lays a responsibility upon you as you receive your new-born child. A precious little immortal soul, whose eternal destiny depends largely upon you. The proper training of children is attended with many difficulties, and every parent certainly needs instruction from God. ”

“ The sons bred in such a family will be moral men, of steady habits; and the daughters, if the mother shall have performed the duties of a parent in the superintendence of their education, as faithfully as she has done those of a wife, will each be a treasure to her husband ”

“ That the boy love his father is as necessary to his welfare as that he love his mother, and the mother should, in all the early years in which the sex instruction may fall most heavily on her, impress upon the young [Pg 121] heart the beauty and glory of paternity. The sacrifice of the father who gives all his strength and time, scarce allowing himself a moment of relaxation or absence from business that he may provide for the needs of the family, is as great as the sacrifice of the mother who devotes her time and strength to caring for the home and the children. ”

“ It is very natural for them, like children, to feel after home and father and mother, and the scenes of their youth. And it is very natural, too, for the sympathies of parents to be with their children. ”

“ Teach your children; for you are their guardians, to act as father and mother to them until they are out of your care. The teachings and examples of our mothers have formed, to a great extent, our characters and directed our lives. ”

“ How necessary is it, then, that persons occupying the position of parents in the prevalent organization of the family should not be left to exhaust themselves in undirected efforts, but that the development of their ability and power to properly perform the duties of the father and mother of the new era should be made the subject of the earnest thought and attention of the child. ”

“ I grant it, in the ordinary course of things in this life; but, General De Benyon, what claims have you as a parent upon me? A son in most cases is indebted to his parents for their care and attention in infancy—his education—his religious instruction—his choice of a profession, and his advancement in life, by their exertions and interest; and when they are called away, he has a reasonable expectation of their leaving him a portion of their substance. ”

“ The father encounters hardships, struggles against difficulties, and braves dangers to provide for his household; the mother tenderly supplies the infant's wants, finding relief and pleasure in imparting nourishment, and surrounds helpless infancy with an affection which is unwearied in its countless ministering attentions. ”

“ Answer child’s questions regarding origin of life reverently, seriously, honestly, with emphasis upon nurturing and on social coöperation of mother and father; give a bias toward the social and spiritual relations of family life, and a suggestion of the future parental responsibilities of the child. ”

“ Less often [Pg 40] have I seen a father so rear his son that he revealed his inmost purpose to be the fostering of his son's nobleness. Are there as many parents who would have their children finely serviceable as highly successful? ”

“ By marriage parents decree the personality of their children. By “personality” I mean the inherent tendencies—physical, mental and moral—which, when developed wisely or unwisely, make or mar the character. In that little pink lump of humanity—the pride of the father and the joy of the mother—are bound up in various combinations the incidents, passions and capacities of the parents. ”

“ Ill-usage of children may be the act either of relatives or of strangers. Among the relatives, we have first of all the unmarried mother; secondly, the natural father; thirdly, the stepmother; fourthly, the lawful parents. Among strangers, we have chiefly to consider teachers and foster-parents. ”

“ It is a fact that in some countries the father has to purchase the child from its mother; and in the Roman ceremony of the husband raising the baby from the floor we may trace the savage idea that the male parent must formally proclaim his adoption of and responsibility for the offspring. ”

“ Know you not that in well regulated households, children are formed from the father and mother, each in turn, or often from both together, because the mother mingles her qualities with the vital force of the father? ”

“ We are further taught by the Lord, that "for this cause," that is, because we were created male and female, "shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife;" which shows us that the conjugial relation is to endure when the parental, or the tie that binds parent to child, has ceased to exist. ”

“ If the parent owns him,—mind, body, and soul, we must adopt one line of argument; if, as a human being, he owns himself, we must adopt another. In my thought the parent is simply a divinely appointed guardian, who acts for his child until he attains what we call the age of discretion,—that highly uncertain period which arrives very late in life with some persons, and not at all with others. ”

“ Parents are wrong to check as they do the outgoings of fraternal affection, by separating those whom God has especially joined as the offspring of one father and one mother. God has beautifully mingled them, by sending now a babe of one sex, now of the other, and suiting, as any careful observer may discern, their various characters to form a domestic whole. ”

“ In thus shaping your children’s future, we cannot but think that the father will be as richly blessed for instilling correct principles, or as surely condemned for wrong training and example, as the mother. ”

“ The cautions, counsels, and commands which our parents gave us agree with the word of God, and therefore we must hold them fast. Children, when they are grown up, must remember the law of a good mother, as well as the commandment of a good father, Ecclesiasticus iii. 2. The Lord has given the father honour over the children and has confirmed the authority of the mother over the sons. ”

“ The mother has to create the father for the children progressively, timing the stages of the structure to the expansion of their intelligence, and she has to awake in them not only a sense of his beauty, goodness and power, but of his displeasure, his wisdom even in denial, and the sanctity of his preoccupations. ”

“ The influence of the mother will be longer applied and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation;" ”

“ No advice, no exposure, will be of use until the right relation exists between the father and mother and their son. To deserve his confidence, to keep it as the chief treasure committed to them by God;—to be, the father his strength, the mother his sanctification, and both his chosen refuge, through all weakness, evil, danger, and amazement of his young life. ”

“ At any rate, just as many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all their younger children in the hands of the mother. ”

“ Indeed, it is sometimes to be remarked in this kind of variation, that the variety belongs, strictly speaking, to neither of the immediate parents; you will see a child in a family who is not like either its father or its mother ”

“ Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child's surest safeguard, and a parent's subtlest power. So the young hearts hide trouble or temptation till the harm is done, and mutual regret comes too late. Happy the boys and girls who tell all things freely to father or mother, sure of pity, help, and pardon; and thrice happy the parents who, out of their own experience, and by their own virtues, can teach and uplift the souls for which they are responsible. ”

“ We will suppose a good family, and that the parents are conscientious, and have a general confidence in the judgment and acquirements of the governess. But if the mother is a person of decided views, and fixed in her own opinions, and the father also, you might immediately find insuperable difficulties. You would not like to exert any influence opposed to the parental, however injudicious you might deem that to be. ”

“ The parents have been chosen because they are fitted to give such a body as will be suitable for the development of the ego committed to them, but with every pair of parents there are manifold possibilities. ”

“ There are many children born out of wedlock, of mothers of infamous characters, which the father, who may be of a somewhat higher rank of life, with a laudable anxiety for the welfare of his offspring, takes from the mother and educates. ”

“ And, to say truth, in nature it is much a like matter; insomuch that we see a nephew sometimes resembleth an uncle, or a kinsman, more than his own parent; as the blood happens. Let parents choose betimes, the vocations and courses they mean their children should take; for then they are most flexible; and let them not too much apply themselves to the disposition of their children, as thinking they will take best to that, which they have most mind to. ”

“ The father, having neither authority, power, responsibility, or charge in his children, is of course, as among brutes, the least attached to his offspring; the mother, by the natural law which renders the infant dependent on her for its first year's nourishment, is more so ”