Counsels to Parents, Teachers, and Students

Importance of Home Training

One great cause of the existing deplorable state of things is that parents do not feel under obligation to bring up their children to conform to physical law. Mothers love their children with an idolatrous love and indulge their appetite when they know that it will injure their health and thereby bring upon them disease and unhappiness. This cruel kindness is manifested to a great extent in the present generation. The desires of children are gratified at the expense of health and happy tempers, because it is easier for the mother, for the time being, to gratify them than to withhold that for which they clamor. Thus mothers are sowing the seed that will spring up and bear fruit. CT 82.1

The children are not educated to deny their appetites and restrict their desires, and they become selfish, exacting, disobedient, unthankful, unholy. Mothers who are doing this work will reap with bitterness the fruit of the seed they have sown. They have sinned against Heaven and against their children, and God will hold them accountable. CT 82.2

Had education for generations back been conducted upon an altogether different plan, the youth of this generation would not now be so depraved and worthless. The managers and teachers of schools should have been those who understood physiology, and who had an interest, not only to educate the youth in the sciences, but teach them how to preserve health, so that they might use their knowledge to the best account after they had obtained it.... CT 83.1