Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 October 1875 — Don’t Let Your Child Tattle. [ARTICLE]

Don’t Let Your Child Tattle.

Never listen to small, unpleasant statements made by your child, if they should relate to his fellows. Not that a child should ever be made to feel that he has nosympathy in his small troubles, but it is just as easy, and even easier, to teach him a chivalric sentiment of endurance while he is in die beginning of his Childhood as it is afterward. If lus companions be selfish and arrogant, show him how disagreeable and despicable a quality it is, and instruct him to abhor it in himself. Complaining is in itself a mean-spirited thing, and tattling is still worse, and a child cannot too soon comprehend its baseness. And here a wise, strong and careful distinction must be made. While the child is brought to feel the full sympathy of the mother, and an entirely confiding habit is encouraged about things that relate solely to himself, the small faults of his fellows are not subjects to be included in this confidence —they are to remain forever unspoken to her or to anybody. Of course we do not mean that a knowledge of criminal conduct in a companion should not be shared with the ll parents, but even such relations should be told in the most sacred trust and secrecy, as one would confess their own sins to their Maker. The; small petulances, trifling misdeeds, arrogant assumptions, demands for the best positions when at play, greed for sweetest pleasures by playmates very naturally rouse dissensions among small people, just as they do among maturer ones. It is the mother’s duty to discover these unpleasant habits in her child’s companions; and while not encouraging a statement from him in regard to them, she should not permit the principles involved in them to pass’without making them subjects of useful conversation. But the names of the children who are involved in the talk about misdeeds should never be spoken by the mother. The principles of justice and honor are enough for a proper amount of discussion and instruction. To make the noble qualities of manhood and womanhood beautiful, their charms should be familiar to the child, and so interwoven in his young thoughts that selfishness, petulance, complaining, disapproving of others to make his own way seem right should all seem sentiments unworthy of him. — The Metropolitan. —Everything should be sacrificed to keeping the expenses of business inside of the receipts. That eminent philosopher, Wilkins Micawber, sounded the key-note when he formulated his theory: Income, £2O; expenses, £l9, 19s. 6d.—result, hap-, piness. Income, £2O; expenses, £2O, Os. 6d.—result, misery; and his life furnished a powerful negative argument in its support. As a rule, wealth is not acquired spasmodically. The solid men of all communities are those who by steady industry and (as the advertisements say) “ close attention to business” make constant accretions to their capital, and even inkard times find themselves on the happy side of Mr. Micawber’s formula.