Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young / Or, the Principles on Which a Firm Parental Authority May Be Established and Maintained, Without Violence or Anger, and the Right Development of the Moral and Mental Capacities Be Promoted by Methods in Harmony with the Structure and the Characteristics of the Juvenile Mind

by Jacob Abbott

The most implicit Faith to be kept with Children in Money Transactions.

I will not say that a father, if he is a man of business, ought to be as jealous of his credit with his children as he is of his credit at the bank; but I think, if he takes a right view of the subject, he will be extremely sensitive in respect to both. If he is a man of high and honorable sentiments, and especially if he looks forward to future years when his children shall have arrived at maturity, or shall be approaching towards it, and sees how important and how delicate the pecuniary relations between himself and them may be at that time, he will feel the importance of beginning by establishing, at the very commencement, not only by means of precept, but by example, a habit of precise, systematic, and scrupulous exactitude in the fulfillment of every pecuniary obligation. It is not necessary that he should do any thing mean or small in his dealings with them in order to accomplish this end. He may be as liberal and as generous with them in many ways as he pleases, but he must keep his accounts with them correctly. He must always, without any demurring or any excuse, be ready to fulfill his engagements, and teach them to fulfill theirs.

Possible Range of Transactions between Parents and Children.

The parent, after having initiated his children into the regular transaction of business by his mode of managing their allowance-fund, may very advantageously extend the benefits of the system by engaging with them from time to time in other affairs, to be regulated in a business-like and systematic manner. For example, if one of his boys has been reserving a portion of his spending-money as a watch-fund, and has already half enough for the purchase, the father may offer to lend him the balance and take a mortgage of the watch, to stand until the boy shall have taken it up out of future savings; and he can make out a mortgage-deed expressing in a few and simple words the fact that the watch is pledged to him as security for the sum advanced, and is not to become the absolute property of the boy till the money for which it is pledged is paid. In the course of years, a great number of transactions in this way may take place between the father or mother and their boy, each of which will not only be a source of interest and enjoyment to both parties, but will afford the best possible means of imparting, not only to the child directly interested in them, but to the other children, a practical knowledge of financial transactions, and of forming in them the habit of conducting all their affairs in a systematic and business-like manner.

The number and variety of such transactions in which the modes of doing business among men may be imitated with children, greatly to their enjoyment and interest, is endless. I could cite an instance when what was called a bank was in operation for many years among a certain number of children, with excellent effect. One was appointed president, another cashier, another paying-teller. There was a ledger under the charge of the cashier, with a list of stockholders, and the number of shares held by each, which was in proportion to the respective ages of the children. The bank building was a little toy secretary, something in the form of a safe, into which there mysteriously appeared, from time to time, small sums of money; the stockholders being as ignorant of the source from which the profits of the bank were derived as most stockholders probably are in the case of larger and more serious institutions. Once in six months, or at other periods, the money was counted, a dividend was declared, and the stockholders were paid in a regular and business-like manner.

The effect of such methods as these is not only to make the years of childhood pass more pleasantly, but also to prepare them to enter, when the time comes, upon the serious business of life with some considerable portion of that practical wisdom in the management of money which is often, when it is deferred to a later period, acquired only by bitter experience and through much suffering.

Indeed, any parent who appreciates and fully enters into the views presented in this chapter will find, in ordinary cases, that his children make so much progress in business capacity that he can extend the system so as to embrace subjects of real and serious importance before the children arrive at maturity. A boy, for instance, who has been trained in this way will be found competent, by the time that he is ten or twelve years old, to take the contract for furnishing himself with caps, or boots and shoes, and, a few years later, with all his clothing, at a specified annual sum. The sum fixed upon in the case of caps, for example, should be intermediate between that which the caps of a boy of ordinary heedlessness would cost, and that which would be sufficient with special care, so that both the father and the son could make money, as it were, by the transaction. Of course, to manage such a system successfully, so that it could afterwards be extended to other classes of expenses, requires tact, skill, system, patience, and steadiness on the part of the father or mother who should attempt it; but when the parent possesses these qualities, the time and attention that would be required would be as nothing compared with the trouble, the vexation, the endless dissatisfaction on both sides, that attend upon the ordinary methods of supplying children's wants—to say nothing of the incalculable benefit to the boy himself of such a training, as a part of his preparation for future life.

Evil Results to be feared.

Nor is it merely upon the children themselves, and that after they enter upon the responsibilities of active life, that the evils resulting from their having had no practical training in youth in respect to pecuniary responsibilities and obligations, that evil consequences will fall. The great cities are full of wealthy men whose lives are rendered miserable by the recklessness in respect to money which is displayed by their sons and daughters as they advance towards maturity, and by the utter want, on their part, of all sense of delicacy, and of obligation or of responsibility of any kind towards their parents in respect to their pecuniary transactions. Of course this must, in a vast number of cases, be the result when the boy is brought up from infancy with the idea that the only limit to his supply of money is his ingenuity in devising modes of putting a pressure upon his father. Fifteen or twenty years spent in managing his affairs on this principle must, of course, produce the fruit naturally to be expected from such seed.

The great Difficulty.