Aunt Sophronia's advice on teaching children to be patient

I find that people’s grandest mistakes and most unutterable failures are connected with the training of their children. Thus it has been in all time, and even in the families of holy people. Isaac seems to have had his hands more than full with son Esau; and Jacob found plenty of trouble among his thirteen. David’s sons turned out sadly, some of them. It is no wonder that Ishmael went out of the ways of Abraham so quickly, when Abraham turned him adrift so early; and while Lot’s children seem to have been a desperate set, Mrs. Lot was most likely to blame for that, especially with Lot’s going to live in a wicked place like Sodom just for gain, which no father of a family should have done. It appears to me that when there is failure, we can usually go back and put our finger on some error and say: “Here is where the wrong began.” But then it is always easier to see the beginning from the end, than the end from the beginning. We know well enough roads that we have travelled over! Then when the evil is done, it is often too late to mend it. How circumspectly then we should go over unknown ground, where a false step may be fatal!

I remember Mrs. Winton and I went to see Helen when little Tom was a fortnight old. Helen seemed to have some sense of her responsibility, and she said: “What a charge I shall have when it is time to begin to train and educate this child!”

Mrs. Winton looked up: “Helen, you should have begun to train and to educate a fortnight ago. Education should begin with the first hour of a babe’s life, and it should from that hour have a fixed end.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Helen.

“The end of our education should be to develop the child in every direction, into the very best and highest which it is capable of attaining. We must always remember that the child will live forever in another world than this; that in this world it will be a member of a social system, and will have duties to its race. It is also an individual, with its private and particular nature and emotions, which are to be regarded in its up-bringing. So, Helen, begin at once to train your babe: as an individual, with regard to its rights; and as a member of society, with regard to its duties.”

“But, Mrs. Winton, what can one teach so young a child?”

“Patience is the child’s earliest lesson. It can be taught to wait. Don’t give it what it is crying for while it cries. Calm it tenderly first, and then promptly give the food or the toy; as it grows older, whatever it is proper for it to have: it soon associates receiving with quiet and pleasant asking. So you can teach the child, as a member of society, to cry softly, and not disturb the house with wild shrieks. You can calm and soothe a very young child to mild crying, and get it habituated not to roar and bellow.”

“I always noticed, Mrs. Winton,” I said, “that your children cried quietly, and did not fill the neighborhood with shrieks.”

“I always pitied them when they were hurt, not in the ratio of the noise they made, as many do, but in the ratio of their gentleness about their trouble. Children love sympathy, to be petted and pitied — if shrieking like Comanches is the price of notice, of course they will shriek. I used to say ‘softly, softly, and then I shall feel so sorry for you. Ah! what a good child to be so patient!’ They learned a pride in patience and endurance. I have seen mothers feeding a child with two spoons, nurse and mother feeding together, to keep the child from screaming as soon as its mouth was empty. The thing is a fact, and ruined the child’s temper and digestion. A child should be taught to wait patiently while its food is preparing, and while itself is being made ready to eat it. Naturally, the little one is the centre of its own universe, and believes the world was made when it was, and for it. We must early teach the child, in patience, gentleness and generosity, to know that it has compeers whose rights are as settled as its own.”

The importance of order in the home

[Aunt Sophronia discusses time management with Hester, Helen and Miriam.]

“Is it better,” asked Miriam, “to know something of everything, or absolutely everything of something?”

“Absolutely, one can do neither,” I said.

“Well, within human limitations, understood.”

“It is better,” said Hester, “to know everything of something; for thoroughness is in itself a great virtue, and will enter into all your life, making one in all things painstaking and honest.”

“This devoting yourself to one thing, however,” said Helen, “will make you one-idea, crotchety, a hobby-rider, and you will be detestable.”

“These people of one idea have been the people who moved the world,” retorted Hester.

“The fact is, my dear girls,” I interposed, “no one branch of study stands isolated; it reaches out and intermingles and takes hold of others. Hester’s ideas are in the main correct; study that for which you find in yourselves most aptitude; aspire to completeness in whatever you undertake; value knowledge, and seize whatever comes in your way, and put what you acquire to use as fast as you can. The Lord found great fault with the servant who buried his talent in a napkin.”

“What do you suppose his talent was?” asked Helen.

“Time, perhaps: the one talent common to all.”

“And what was the napkin wherein he buried it?” asked Hester.

“Disorder, doubtless; for you can bury more time in disorder than in any other way.”

“I must be very disorderly, then,” laughed Helen, “for since I went to housekeeping I have no time for anything; you have no idea how behind-hand I am. I have not opened my piano except on a few evenings; I have a whole basketful of accumulated sewing, and hose for darning: I haven’t read anything but two or three novels; I have not done a bit of fancy-work —”

“My dear girl! I cried, “if this is your record now, what will become of you when cares increase? — say, for instance, if there were two or three little ones.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Helen; “I should have to set up another servant or two, and then we should be bags of rags and all our buttons would be off, I expect.”

“Indeed, Helen,” I urged, “there must be a sad mistake somewhere if you have reached this result. Living here in the village, with but two in the family, you have a very modicum of household cares; what think you of young wives on farms who have chicks to feed, several hands to cook for, butter to make, oftentimes no servant, or but a young girl? and yet nearly all of them would make a better showing than this. I remember when Cousin Ann’s three elder children were little things, and she kept but a half-grown girl, there were no rags and no mending in arrears, and all the farm-work being done by half-past two, she could sit down to make or mend, and in the evening pick up a book or a newspaper. She made a point of reading as much as she could, so as to be able to interest and instruct her children. Her son Reed’s wife has a young child and keeps no help; she sends butter and eggs to market, and manages to well in all her work that she has spare hours for making pretty and useful things for her house, for reading, and for doing all her own sewing, and not being behind-hand with it. Depend on it, the secret lies in industrious order — in what is called good management.”

“But I cannot understand it, Helen,” said Miriam: “your house has only ten rooms beside the bath, and you keep a servant: where does your time go?”

“How can I tell where it goes, when I never can find it?” grumbled Helen. “I dare say you don’t understand it. Why, aunt, there is Miriam doing the most of her own work; no matter when I go there, the work is all done; the house is neat as a pin; Miriam is sitting at her reading or her sewing; she has made perfect gems of fancy things that stick here and there in her house; even in her kitchen she has fancy wall-pockets for string, paper and little bags; fancy holders, a pincushion hung by the window, a crocheted scrap-bag, and, if you believe me, always a bouquet in the window!”

“Why not have it nice?” said Miriam. “I have to be there often, and I can work faster where things are handy, and enjoy myself better when things are pretty. Why should I run upstairs for every pin I want, or look five minutes when I need a string, or have scraps of rag and paper stuffed in corners for want of a convenient bag to put them?”

“What amazes me is,” said Helen, “where you get the time for all those things.?

“I got it from Mrs. Burr for a wedding gift,” said Miriam.

“Do explain: I wish she had been as liberal to me.”

“She sent me a book of her own making, two boards of gray Bristol, bound in red satin and painted with one of her lovely landscapes. Inside was only a single page: that was white Bristol, illuminated with a wreath of flowers, bees and butterflies, and this motto within: ‘Always be one hour in advance of your work.’ I saw at once that there was the key to the Order that reigns at Mrs. Burr’s. If I were an hour beforehand with work I should never be hurried nor worried; if I began at once, the habit of being in season would be fixed. I saw also that the one hour would by good judgment in planning grow to many, the housekeeping matter out and have an exact routine for it; it was little trouble to do that. I had only to copy Aunt Sophronia: she always had exact order here.”

Introducing Aunt Sophronia

OUR AUNT SOPHRONIA lives in one of our inland towns. She is the relative of many of the townspeople — the Oracle of all. Firmly entrenched in her own opinions, and more than usually self-complacent, she is yet ready to give other people their due; her ideas are broad and sound, and she is no doubt a great blessing to our community. An indefatigable diarist, she has for many years recorded the best of what she thinks and learns on her favorite theme — THE HOME. These journals being too voluminous, and too full of private affairs, to present bodily to the public, she has at our earnest solicitation reproduced part of them topically, and with a happy facility in discussing her subject from the beginning.

— Julia McNair Wright

Aunt Sophronia discusses, First —

THE CAPITAL UPON WHICH TO MARRY

It will be a long day before I call myself old, simply because I don’t feel old, and I have been much too busy in my life to have time to grow old; but these three girls, who were babes in my arms when I was woman-grown, are women now, and talking of marrying — at least the two elder ones. I suppose they have been going on, while I have stood still! At least so it looks to me, as it does to people riding on fast trains, as if all the world were moving and they themselves stationary! 

The three girls are my three nieces: Miriam I brought up; Helen was brought up by her grandmother; and Hester came up as she chose, as her mother, my sister, died when the child was ten, and John Rochedale, her father, says, he “thinks every individuality ought to be left to develop on its own line.” Of all things! If I had married John Rochedale, as once seemed likely, instead of my sister, he and I would have had some very serious differences of opinion, this subject of “developing” being one of the many whereon we don’t agree. I am not particularly sorry that it was Ellen instead of me who became Mrs. Rochedale; not that I object to the married state: I do not doubt that the Lord knew what he was about when he set a married pair at housekeeping in Eden; but the single state has also its advantages, as Paul saw.

However most people who preach up “Paul on single-blessedness” seem to forget that, in the Bible, our great Guide-Book, the Lord’s opinions for matrimony come a long ways before Paul’s for celibacy. I don’t think that women should feel that, merely because they are not wives, they have no place nor work in the world, no home-life, no effect on coming generations; and I don’t think that women, who, for various reasons, have not married, should set themselves up as holier or better off than their married sisters.

I’ve given my nieces a deal of good advice, and among the rest I’ve advised them to marry, if the matter came reasonably to hand, without making it an object in life.