Notebook Leaflets from the Elmshaven Library, vol. 1

Parents and Children

Many parents who have believed the truth for years have failed to train their children in the way they should go. Notwithstanding all the light that has shone on them, they have indulged their children, making them mere household pets, mere idols.... 1NL 26.1

Too often parents allow their children to grow up in ignorance of household labor. To save their children the least discomfort, the father and the mother make themselves the household drudges. They get up early in the morning to build a fire and cook breakfast. While they are busy with their daily cares, they allow their dear, lazy children to lie in bed, calling them only in time to eat that which has been prepared by the labor of others. They consult the wishes of their children and excuse them if they are not up early. 1NL 26.2

What a delusion parents must be under who pursue so unwise a course in training children! In thus making everything secondary to the supposed comfort of their children, unwise parents deprive them of the capacity for enjoying even this life. Parents should train their daughters to bear life's burdens, that they may be well qualified to act their part as faithful, judicious, ingenious, economical housekeepers. In afterlife they will appreciate the training that taught them to bear burdens. 1NL 26.3

Many girls from sixteen to twenty years of age are unskilled in cookery or in any other kind of domestic labor. These girls can eat, sleep, and dress; they can use their fingers in doing fancy-work; but they claim that labor over a washtub makes them sick. Cooking they do not understand. “Mother prefers to cook,” they say. Why does she?—Because her daughters have not chosen to help her. They have not been trained to enjoy the doing of home duties and are as unfitted to become wives as are babies. 1NL 26.4

Among us are hard-working men, men who earn large wages, but who are always financially cramped and often in debt. What is the cause?—Nothing more, nothing less, than this: Their wives are not practical housekeepers. In their youth they did not gain the experience that they should have gained. They are not skilled cooks. They waste much—enough to supply another family. Yet their own families are not half provided with nourishing food. They think they must use canned meat, or something else already prepared. If in their girlhood such wives had been taught how to make a little go as far as possible, they could prepare palatable, nourishing food from simple, inexpensive ingredients. 1NL 26.5

Such girls seldom realize and remedy their deficiencies, and therefore, when they become mothers, they are unprepared to educate their children aright. They cannot give to others the knowledge that they themselves do not possess. Because of a lack of care, skill, economy, and experience in household matters, both mothers and children waste much. Thus they spend all that the father earns. The hard-working husband and father is always cramped financially. Because he never has at his command means to aid the cause of God, he is discouraged. 1NL 26.6

These cases are not rare. On every hand they are to be found. And many an honest, truehearted man has become so discouraged and desperate that in order to lighten his load he has been led to practice dishonesty.—Manuscript 21, 1902. 1NL 26.7