Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children

by Pye Henry Chavasse

A child who never gets into mischief must be either sly, or delicate, or idiotic; indeed, the system of many persons, in bringing up children, is likely to make them either the one or the other. The present plan of training children is nearly all work (books), and very little play. Play, and plenty of it, is necessary to the very existence of a child.

A boy not partial to mischief, innocent mischief, and play, is unnatural; he is a man before his time, he is a nuisance, he is disagreeable to himself and to every one around. He is generally a sneak, and a little humbug.

Girls, at the present time, are made clever simpletons; their brains are worked with useless knowledge, which totally unfits them for every-day duties. Their muscles are allowed to be idle, which makes them limp and flabby. The want of proper exercise ruins the complexion, and their faces become of the colour of a tallow candle! And precious wives and mothers they make when they do grow up! Grow up, did I say? They grow all manner of ways, and are as crooked as crooked sticks!

What an unnatural thing it is to confine a child several hours a day to his lessons; why, you might as well put a colt in harness, and make him work for his living! A child is made for play; his roguish little eye, his lithe figure, his antics, and his drollery, all point out that he is cut out for play—that it is as necessary to his existence as the food he eats, and as the air he breathes!

A child ought not to be allowed to have playthings with which he can injure either himself or others, such as toy-swords, toy-cannons, toy-paint-boxes, knives, bows and arrows, hammers, chisels, saws, &c. He will not only be likely to injure himself and others, but will make sad havoc on furniture, house, and other property. Fun, frolic, and play ought, in all innocent ways, to be encouraged; but wilful mischief and dangerous games ought, by every means, to be discountenanced. This advice is frequently much needed, as children prefer to have and delight in dangerous toys, and often coax and persuade weak and indulgent mothers to gratify their wishes.

Painted toys are, many of them, highly dangerous, those painted green especially, as the colour generally consists of Scheele's green—arsenite of copper.

Children's paint-boxes are very dangerous toys for a child to play with; many of the paints are poisonous, containing arsenic, lead, gamboge, &c, and a child, when painting, is apt to put the brush into his mouth, to absorb the superabundant fluid. Of all the colours, the green paint is the most dangerous, as it is frequently composed of arsenite of copper—arsenic and copper—two deadly poisons.

There are some paint-boxes warranted not to contain a particle of poison of any kind these ought, for a child, to be chosen by a mother.

But, remember, although he ought not to be allowed to have poison paint-boxes and poison painted toys, he must have an abundance of toys, such as the white wood toys—brewers' drays, millers' waggons, boxes of wooden bricks, &c. The Noah's Ark is one of the most amusing and instructive toys for a child. "Those fashioned out of brown, unpainted pine-wood by the clever carvers of Nuremberg or the Black Forest are the best, I think, not only because they are the most spirited, but because they will survive a good deal of knocking about and can be sucked with impunity From the first dawn of recollection, children are thus familiarised with the forms of natural objects, and may be well up in natural history before they have mastered the ABC" [Footnote: From an excellent article About Toys, by J Hamilton Fyfe in Good Words for December 1862.]

Parents often make Sunday a day of gloom; to this I much object. Of all the days in the week, Sunday should be the most cheerful and pleasant. It is considered by our Church a festival, and a glorious festival it ought to be made, and one on which our Heavenly Father wishes to see all His children happy and full of innocent joy. Let Sunday, then, be made a cheerful, joyous, innocently happy day, and not, as it frequently is, the most miserable and dismal in the week. It is my firm conviction that many men have been made irreligious by the ridiculously strict and dismal way they were compelled, as children, to spend their Sundays. You can no more make a child religious by gloomy asceticism, than yon can make people good by Act of Parliament.