Parental love

“ Surely, where parents do their duty, children can never know a tie stronger, or as strong, as their earliest dependence on a parent’s love produces! and, after the lapse of many years, how fresh and vivid still are the recollections of parental and filial love! ”

“ THE RIGHT CONDITION.—The great practical inference is, that those parents who desire intellectual and moral children, must love each other; because, this love, besides perpetually calling forth and cultivating their higher faculties, awakens them to the highest pitch of exalted action in that climax, concentration, and consummation of love which propagates their existing qualities, the mental endowment of offspring being proportionate to the purity and intensity of parental love. ”

“ Nothing, however, can damp parental love; and, to a fond mother's feelings, childhood has no unpleasant features; though it is different to him who, if approaching them at all, prefers looking at them in a drier aspect. ”

“ Reverence thy son and thy daughter lest thy days seem too long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. One of the elements making for conflict between parent and child is the desire of parents who ask for love, taking respect for granted, and the insistence of children, taking love for granted, that parental respect be yielded them. There are many causes that make mutual respect in any real sense difficult between parent and child, parents asking love for themselves as parents, children seeking respect for themselves as persons. ”

“ Next to the priceless jewel of a mother's love, is the watchful care of a father's strong affection. And it seems to me that many boys and young men and older men, too, who have noble and loving fathers, so no always appreciate the love and care bestowed upon them by the parental hand. ”

“ There is a parental affection, rational and steady, which may be quite sufficient to secure a consistent regard to the welfare of a family; and powerful enough to sustain the labours and self-denials involved in conducting an educational course. But there is an affection going very far beyond any such passive, measured love. There is a love of offspring that knows no restrictive reasons; that extends to any length of personal suffering or toil; a feeling of absolute self-renunciation, whenever the interests of children involve a compromise of the comfort or tastes of the parent. ”

“ The assurance derived from the fondness felt by parents for their offspring, and the self-denying efforts made for the good of children, will hardly carry us very far, even supposing it certain that parental love would remain unaffected by the general change. ”

“ Granted that parental government is of a most mistaken sort in some cases, and that it is not perfect in any case, it still remains true that family affection furnishes one of mankind's [Pg 556] greatest joys, and that the love of the parent should, and even does, on the average, make the best protection and educator weak and clinging childhood can have. ”

“ Parental fondness, sufficing for the preservation and rearing of children, is a very old thing, but parental affection, which is altruistically concerned for the weal of children in after-life, is a comparatively modern invention. The foregoing chapters have taught us that an Australian father's object in giving his daughter in marriage was to get in exchange a new girl-wife for himself ”

“ What charms and momentous interests surround the cradle of infancy! When the first wailing of dependence reaches the listening ear, what new-born sympathies spring up in the parent’s bosom! What a thrill of rapture the first soft smile of her babe sends to the mother’s heart! It is this, the parents’ likeness unsullied by their faults and cares; it is this, their living love in personal being,—their love breathing and smiling before them, lisping their names ”

“ What the lover is to youth the parents are to childhood—the object of worship and affection, the idol of the heart. It has always seemed to me that a parent is protector and lover blended in one. Towards both we are drawn by the same desire, to make the beloved a part of ourselves, to have complete possession. The disappointment is the same in each case when love is not reciprocated, and we feel an equal readiness to embrace pain and adversity in order to promote the happiness of the beloved. ”

“ The boy who knows that his father and his mother love him with measureless patience in his faults, and love him out of them, is not slow to perceive, and receive, and understand the dealings of the higher Love.
But why should good parents, more than the rest of us, be expected to exhibit so divine a love? ”

“ Who can administer all these elements so essential for the blossoming of the child’s soul more tenderly than a mother? And where an inscrutable destiny has taken her away, those who stand in her place must be inspired with her deep love and affection, her tender heart and her keen vision into the child’s being. ”

“ What can a parent have more at heart than the good opinion of his child? In all our transactions with him our honour must be inviolate, the integrity of our relations untainted: fate and circumstance may, when he arrives at maturity, separate us for ever—but, as his aegis in danger, his consolation in hardship, let the ardent youth for ever bear with him through the rough path of life, love and honour for his parents. ”

“ But even if it should be the case that the parents have no souls capable of profound feeling, but only hearts which can bleed—it is nevertheless the duty of the child towards itself, and towards past and future generations, to give to its own nature the highest possible perfection through love. ”

“ And of the Moral Life.—​And her affections—the movements of the outgoing tender child-heart—how are they treated? There are few mothers who do not take pains to cherish the family affections; but when the child comes to have dealings with outsiders, [Pg 17] do no worldly maxims and motives ever nip the buds of childish love? ”

“ And when, low though they are in the scale of life, we find them (though curiously enough always the fathers) carrying the eggs, building nests for them, and defending the young, we see that even here, in the very beginning of backboned life, we touch the root of true sympathy, the love of parent for child. ”

“ The mother's heart is subject to a higher, holier law than that which separates her erring child from the fellowship of mankind; the father meets his returning son while yet afar off; and the sister—can she withhold her welcome?—can she neglect the study of all those little arts of love, by which a father's home may be rendered as alluring as the world? ”

“ Oh, how beautiful is paternal affection!—the love of an only surviving parent for an only child—and she a female. It is beautiful as the smile of Providence on benevolence—it is strong as the bond which binds the world to a common centre—it is enduring as the affections which, being cherished on earth, are matured above! ”

“ Fathers and mothers, you must make your children happy, if you would make them good. You must surround them with an atmosphere of affection and enjoyment, if you would teach them to love you, and to love GOD. It is when held close in their mothers' arms, with tender eyes bent over them, that children first get some faint idea of that Infinite Love, of which maternal fondness is but the faint reflection. ”

“ In one sense, all young beings are unloving; in another, they are as vessels filled, brimming over with love seeking an outlet. This girl would watch her mother about a room, walk behind her in the streets—adoringly. Such intense worship of their parents is more common in children than we imagine. A boy of five years was asked what he thought the most beautiful thing in the world. “Velvet,” he replied, with dreamy eyes, evidently thinking of his mother in a velvet gown. His parents are the greatest and wisest, the most powerful, and the best people within the narrow range of the child’s world. ”

“ He would anticipate that his mother and father, with such a heredity and education, would be high-minded above dissipation and triflings, sensible beyond unhygienic habits in food and in dress, well-poised and superior to pettiness and discords, with a radiant love that maintained an atmosphere of joyousness, graciousness, courage. Having chosen each other because they loved each other, his father and mother would live and work and plan because they loved him. ”

“ Who has not witnessed the unfailing and unconquerable strength of a mother's love for the son of her heart and her vows, cleaving to its object through prosperity and through adversity, through honor and through shame, with a constancy which never wavers? And what son, especially after the thoughtlessness of youth has given place to the reflection of maturer years, and experience has taught him the insincerity and selfishness of the world—what son has not turned back and lingered, with the most grateful emotions, over the pleasing memories of a mother's care ”

“ What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child? The affection he bears and its counterpart are the ornaments of the world, and the spring of every thing that makes life worth having. ”

“ I believe that reasonable parents create reasonable children. The children must feel their parents’ affection—not duty and responsibility, for which no child is grateful, but warm love, which feels delight in the child’s presence and ways. ”

“ But is it not more common, now-a-days, for children to caress and patronise their parents, and make all too sure of their love? It may be; but only where parents have lost that indescribable attribute—dignity? authority?—which is their title to their children’s love and worship; and the affection which is lavished too creaturely-wise on children fails to meet the craving of their nature. What is it they want, those young things so gaily happy with doll or bat or racquet? They want to be reinstated; they labour, some poor children almost from infancy, under a sad sense of demerit. ”

“ Never rebuked without a sufficient cause, and always more in sorrow than in anger; given a free hand in all things except those injurious or detrimental to him; made a companion and a playmate by both parents—he soon perceived, as any child would, that they had nothing more warmly at heart than his best interests and his happiness. Loved as he was, he gave out152 abundant love in return, and the great ambition of his childhood became a passionate desire to please his father and mother. ”

“ It is like the love of parents for their children, in that they do them good from love to them, not for the sake of themselves, but for their sakes. This is plainly seen in the love of a mother towards infants. ”

“ It enables the parents to enjoy once more the simple pleasures of life, to which they had grown callous; it brings back the peculiarly delicious memories of their own childhood and youth; enables the father to discover his former sweetheart renewed in his daughter, and the mother her former lover in her son; while their common pride in the beauty or accomplishments of the children supplies them with a never-failing topic of conversation and source of sympathy. ”

“ For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? when even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving? ”

“ It is true, and the best thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded, but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give. ”

“ All that a good mother and father have done and suffered in order to advance the welfare of their children, their toil and forbearing love, constitutes a powerful claim to their children’s grateful, reverential, attention and love. ”

“ They gather on your knee, and take possession of you, and make no doubt at all of your love or their deserts. But a child cannot always get out of the nursery before this doubt with two faces is upon him. I know a boy of four, a healthy intelligent child, full of glee and frolic and sense, who yet has many sad moments because one and another do not love him, and other very joyful, grateful moments because some little gift or attention assures him of love. His mother, with the delicate tact mothers have, perceives that the child needs to be continually reinstated in his own esteem. ”

“ Parents that cultivate a love among then children will find that the same feeling will soon be manifested in their children's disposition. Sunshine in the hearts of the parents will blossom in the lives of the children. The parent who continually cherishes a feeling of dislike and rebellion in his soul, cultivating moral hatred against his fellow-man, will soon find the same things manifested by his son. As the son resembles his father in looks so he will to a certain extent resemble him in character. Love in the heart of the parent will beget kindness and affection in the heart of a child. ”

“ They do love—so do we. Is it the old, possessive idea? Children belonging to their parents? They don't belong. Each soul belongs to itself—I'm certain of that. The parents have responsibility, at first, yes—they brought one into the world for their own pleasure, or because they thought it right, or because they couldn't help it. They have to keep their children alive—to do the best they can for them—to tell them the truth as far as they know it. ”