EARLY FEARS
From two to six years of age, when the imagination is most plastic and vivid, when the child's imitative instinct is so unconsciously automatic, is the most effective and opportune time to initiate good habits and lay the foundations for the later development of a strong and noble character. "Baby's skies are Mamma's eyes" is just as true as it is poetical. While a tired and worn-out mother, exhausted by a multitude of harrassing household cares, may be pardoned for her occasional irritability, nevertheless the little one unconsciously partakes of her spirit. When the mother is happy the child is happy. When Mother is sick and nervous the child is impatient and irritable.
It is unfortunate that this very time of a child's life, when we can do practically anything we choose with him, is the very time when so many parents fill the child's mind with the unhealthful fear-thoughts. "The bogie man'll get you if you don't mind Mamma," or, "I'll get the black man to cut your ears off," or, "the chimney sweep is around the corner to take bad little boys," are familiar threats which are so frequently made to the little folks. These efforts to terrorize the young child into obedience never fail to distort the mind, warp the affections, and, more or less permanently, derange the entire nervous system. The arousal of fear-thoughts and fearful emotions in the mind of the growing child is very often such a psychologic and a physiologic shock to the child that the results are sometimes not wholly eradicated in an entire lifetime.
Just see how far we carry this unwholesome introduction of fear-thoughts—even to the Almighty. Thousands of us remember being told as a child that "God don't like naughty boys," or, "God will send the bad man to get you if you don't be good." Thus, early in life, an unwholesome fear of the Supreme Being is sown in the mind of the child, and, as time passes, these false fears grow and come so to possess the mind and control the emotions that in adult life this early teaching comes to mold the character and shape the religious beliefs of the individual.
To the child who has been reared to dread God, who has come to look upon the Creator as an ever present "threat," how is it possible to convey the beautiful teaching of His fatherhood?