Guard Your Children's Hearts

It is told that a great king had a beautiful daughter, and that little princess was the object of her parents' concern; they spent great efforts on her cultivation and refinement. The more she grew, the greater her beauty became, and her fame flew to all corners of the world. Those wishing to visit the king in quest of the lovely princess's hand multiplied, and princes streamed to her father's palace bearing precious gifts and asking the Lord to grant them the king's favor and his daughter's hand. Yet every prince, after meeting the princess, would leave her father's palace without uttering a word.

The proud parents paid no heed, at first, to that sign; but when the number of those of fame and rank who came and left the palace grew large, they began to ask themselves the reason for this strange conduct. After deliberating on the matter, the mother realized that when the princess was a child, the wicked sorceress had snatched away her heart in a fit of rage against her father the king. The mother cried out: "The princess is without a heart! That is why people keep away from her and why the princes have no wish to be joined to her!" The king said: "No doubt this is the reason for our repeated disappointment. If she possesses no heart that loves, how can others be expected to love her? Love is the child of love."

The king sent at once and summoned the sorceress; she confessed her deed and promised to restore the heart to the princess if he lavished gifts upon her. So he gave her all she wanted.

As soon as the princess recovered her heart, her soul shone forth with a new light, her eyes glowed with the warmth of life, and tender feeling gleamed within her; and only from that time on did the princess become truly beautiful. All her ways took on charm and delicacy, and her feeling toward others became the source of her attraction and of people's attachment to her.

When a mother faces, for the first time in her life, the responsibility of caring for her child, the first thing to trouble her mind is the problem of food—what she must feed her child so that his body grows normally—and then she turns her attention to how to develop his mind and nourish it. All this is good and necessary, and we would urge mothers to abound in such care. But this alone is not enough; we must also affirm that our children have hearts—warm, loving hearts—and we must prepare the atmosphere necessary to develop those hearts and preserve them from all harm.

I grieve deeply whenever I see a cultivated mother spending her strength and most of her time on the household tasks, so that when her child draws near her, cooing with joy, hoping to obtain a generous share of her attention, he finds her exhausted and worn, with no patience left for playing with him, and she pushes him away without paying him any heed. It is certainly necessary that we attend to the affairs of our homes, and good, too, that we give them more than ordinary attention—provided this is not at the expense of those tender hearts that turn toward us always in quest of love.

Children thirst for the feeling of affection, and if they do not obtain this overflowing affection from their parents, they lose all pleasure in life and begin to fret and grumble. Therefore the mother must rest herself and discipline her mind so that she keeps her patience for talking and playing with her children; for among the first things that fill a child's heart with joy and create an atmosphere for spiritual growth is the parents' interest in his own affairs—a true and comprehensive interest that takes in all his emotional needs.

In the first period of life the individual develops his habits of thinking and feeling. His love for his parents is a foundation on which he builds his love for others. Those warm kisses a mother exchanges with her child, and those gentle displays of her overflowing tenderness, leave a great mark on her child's life and his happiness in the future. Some mothers believe that if they show a feeling of love toward their children they will have done harm to their upbringing; and so, in their ignorance of the foundations of sound upbringing, they allow those precious hearts to harden and grow bitter. Would that they understood that displays of love cannot rob a child of his personality; what robs him of it is indifference to his condition, neglect of his emotional needs, and want of understanding for his dreams and hopes.

Psychologists have taken to prescribing "a mother's affection" as a medicine for certain intractable conduct. For example: a boy had, by his odd behavior, become a problem to his family and his doctor, so they sought the help of a psychologist to study the boy's conduct and its developments. After study and close examination, the scientist found the boy entirely normal, lacking nothing but the feeling of being loved. So he directed the mother to put her son to bed herself every night and whisper in his ear, "Your mother loves you very much." That simple phrase, whispered with gentleness and delicacy, accompanied by a loving embrace to assure him of the truth of what it expressed, changed all that boy's conduct.

Children often doubt the sincerity of their parents' love for them; therefore parents must leave no room for such doubts, for the child who is left to his doubts for a length of time will inevitably develop in himself what I call "social paralysis"—that is, he becomes a person who does not trust people's feeling toward him, whether that feeling be love or respect or esteem or anything else, but lives in an atmosphere of emotional turmoil which soon breeds in him a feeling of inferiority, since he supposes there is no one who cares about him; so he withdraws from the world and wraps himself up within himself.

One day, while I was visiting a friend, I noticed that her son—a boy of four—was absorbed in cracking walnuts, and I noticed too that he would strike the walnut and hurt his fingers over and over so that it might crack. Only a moment later the boy came up to his mother, the mark of self-satisfaction drawn on his smiling face, opened his dusty hand, and showed us a fistful of walnut meats, saying: "Here, eat this, Mother; I cracked all the walnuts by myself. I ate the little crushed pieces and kept the big pieces for you." As for the mother—who had been busy telling me how impossible it was for her to keep her boy clean—she looked at him with disgust and said: "Aren't you ashamed to appear in such filth before our guests? Go back outside and keep this dirty walnut to yourself." No sooner did the boy hear his mother's words than the flush of shame rose in his face; then he looked about him in bewilderment and fear and ran quickly outside.

As soon as he was gone the mother looked at me and said mockingly: "Did you see how small children's minds are? He believed with his whole mind that I would accept his gift." As for me, having been much pained by this incident, I answered: "I wish he had offered me that gift. I would have accepted it from his hand with pleasure. What is a little dust on walnut meats beside wounding the feelings of a child as precious as yours?" The mother fell silent a little; then I heard her finish, the tears choking her voice: "God keep his heart! There is nothing in the world dearer than he! This is a lesson I shall not forget as long as I live." Then she turned toward me and asked: "Do you think he will ever do it again?"

We mothers have a great duty in life. Our first duty is to develop and preserve the hearts of our children just as we concern ourselves with preserving and developing their minds and bodies. By the parents' patience, their affection, and their full understanding of their children's inner nature, those hearts are delivered from bitterness and rebellion; and by their overflowing love they preserve them from the disease of social paralysis. And let us always remember that whoever possesses a damaged heart cannot love easily; and whoever cannot love others, it is hard for others to love him.