Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden

What chance has a child to lead a noble life when all his first impressionable years are saturated with the suggestion of evil, when jealousy and hatred, revenge, quarreling and bickering, all that is low and degrading, fill his ears and eyes?

How important it is that the child should only hear and see and be taught that which will make for beauty and for truth, for loveliness and grandeur of character!

We ought to have a great deal of charity for those whose early lives have been soaked in evil, criminal, impurity thoughts.

The minds of children are like the sensitive plates of a photographer, recording every thought or suggestion to which they are exposed. These early impressions make up the character and determine the future possibility.

If you would encourage your child and help him to make the most of himself, inject bright, hopeful, optimistic, unselfish pictures into his atmosphere. To stimulate and inspire his confidence and unselfishness means growth, success, and happiness for him in his future years, while the opposite practice may mean failure and misery.

It is of infinitely more importance to hold the right thought towards a child, the confident, successful, happy, optimistic thought, than to leave him a fortune without this. With his mind properly trained he could not fail, could not be unhappy, without reversing the whole formative process of his early life.

Keep the child's mind full of harmony, of truth, and there will be no room for discord, for error.

It is cruel constantly to remind children of their deficiencies or peculiarities. Sensitive children are often seriously injured by the suggestion of inferiority and the exaggeration of defects which might have been entirely overcome. This everlasting harping against the bad does not help the child half as much as keeping his little mind full of the good, the beautiful, and the true. The constant love suggestion, purity suggestion, nobility suggestion will so permeate the life after a while that there will be nothing to attract the opposite. It will be so full of sunshine, so full of beauty and love, that there will be little or no place for their opposites.

The child's self-confidence should be buttressed, braced, and encouraged in every possible way; not that he should be taught to overestimate his ability and his possibilities, but the idea that he is God's child, that he is heir to an Infinite inheritance, magnificent possibilities, should be instilled into the very marrow of his being.

A great many boys, especially those who are naturally sensitive, shy, and timid, are apt to suspect that they lack the ability which others have. It is characteristic of such youths that they distrust their own ability and are very easily discouraged or encouraged. It is a sin to shake or destroy a child's self-confidence, to reflect upon his ability or to suggest that he will never amount to much. These discouraging words, like initials cut in the sapling, grow wider and wider with the years, until they become great ugly scars in the man.