by Fr. Daniel A. Lord, Some Notes for the Guidance of Parents
THE CHILD AS A BOND
All around the infant God and nature meant that there should be displayed a real family unity. The child was intended to bind the mother and the father closer together. As the fruit of their love, he was to give their love fullness of meaning. So if such family unity does result, the child is very lucky indeed.
In his soft brain and upon his flexible emotions is recorded an ideal of home life and family harmony that will profoundly affect the home he himself later comes to establish. That ideal may be the very basis on which, arrived at maturity, he will build his own fine paternity, on which she will establish the virtues of a fine mother. Perhaps the quality of the home he will build is established before he has said for the first time the word mamma or daddy.
Lucky indeed is the child whose growing life is surrounded by an atmosphere of love, the frank love of the mother and the father, their united love for him. He watches and approves and long remembers his parents’ kissing one another on the father’s returning from the day’s work or on his leaving to be gone even for only a few hours.
I have never forgotten the fact that my father invariably kissed my mother even if he meant to be gone only from the room for a little longer than usual and that she greeted him on his homecoming each evening with outstretched arms and an affectionate kiss.
GRACIOUS MEMORIES
The happy symbolism of birthdays becomes a part of his emotional background. The gifts that are given within the family are signs of the welcome felt for the child who added his presence to the family or an indication of the children’s gratitude to their father and mother.
As sounds begin to gather in his mind and become coherent words and intelligible sentences, he grows to approve of the gentle tones that mark the voices of his parents as they speak to each other.
When his father calls his mother dearest, the child may already be aware that this is an adjective in the superlative, reserved for his father’s superlative woman. The poetic word darling, as yet not understood by the child, is still on the lips of his mother clear indication of the affection she feels for his dad.
He comes to know their frank enjoyment of each other’s company. He makes an effort to fit himself into their joy.
Love is the first lesson that should be taught to every child. He should find it in the love of his brothers and sisters for each other and for him. He should see it in the attitude his parents take toward their friends, the real pleasure with which they welcome them. Charity in the true sense of love must begin at home. If it does, it is the warm cushion that protects the new little human being against the harsh shocks of the world that has just received him.
THE IMPRESSIONS OF HOME
Love, we always like to remember, is essentially productive. This is why the love of a mother and a father results in that wonderful production which is a home.
To all of us the home of our childhood remains the most important house in the world. With the years we come to magnify it. We spread out its proportions and invest its rooms with an ample spaciousness they did not really possess.
Priests who have spent quite a time in the seminary, or religious who for a period of years have been living in a religious house, or for that matter a man and a woman who have been long absent from the home of their childhood are amazed upon their return to find how really small the house is.
In their absence they dreamed of the living room as being big enough to contain all their young friends at the same time, plus possibly a couple of swing bands and a small army of secondary acquaintances. They thought of the dining room as being little short of a banquet hall; King Arthur’s knights wouldn’t be too crowded around that ample table.
Then still under the spell of the magnifying power of childish memory they return and find the house quite tiny and the rooms they had remembered as stretching out into space really cramped and almost oppressively narrow.
Such is the simple influence of a sense of importance upon a memory of size. That first house of our childhood was enormously significant; therefore it must have been vast in proportions and capacious in its power to welcome our friends.
The first observations of an infant—after those he makes on his parents—may well be directed toward the room in which he is cradled and then toward the house that surrounds that room. He soon develops a perception of the attitude his parents take toward their home: the song that his mother sings as she goes about her work; the gaiety that seems to fill her soul when she carries him down to the kitchen or moves him about with her as she dusts and vacuums the house.
He notes in a permanent record the interest his father takes in the house. He gets the impression of dad’s cutting the lawn while he himself sits in the sun in his perambulator. He hears the discussion of the new draperies for the windows or the new rug for the floor.
He drinks in the charm of furnishings, which, as anyone knows, need not be expensive to be delightful. The home improves as the earnings of the family increase; after all since it is the setting against which they live their lives, his parents want it to measure up to their advancing income.
VISITORS
The visitors who come to the house certainly make an impression upon him. I have thought that some brilliant cartoonist might well, do two contrasting pictures, both dealing with childhood.
Both pictures would show a cluster of little children behind the staircase railing on the second floor of the house. They are looking down, wide-eyed with interest, their faces thrust out between the spaces in the balustrade, their young brains drinking up the party that is in progress on the lower floor.
The first picture would show a happy, decent, utterly wholesome yet thoroughly enjoyable party. The adults would be having a wonderfully good time. There would be excellent food and drinks either nonintoxicating or if intoxicating handled with the mastery of civilized men and women over a friend who might prove an enemy.
The games would be joyful. The conversation would be brisk. The laughter would be clean, sincere, and from the heart. The artist would not have much difficulty in painting upon the faces of the young observers their total approval of the scene and their delight in the gaiety that fills the house.
The second picture would show a very different type of party. There would be drunks, both male and female. The men would be amorous and the women easy. The games would destroy all sense of dignity. The laughter would be raucous and of that unmistakable timbre that follows the vulgar, obscene jest.
This time the childish faces above might be hard to paint. For they would be frozen in horror, rigid in a paralyzed fascination, revolted yet acutely curious, shocked yet drawn to drink it all in with unblinking stares. I wonder if even the sounds of the party that float up to the infant in the crib, sounds blending subconsciously with his dream phantasms, might not leave a lasting impression.
Certainly there must be a jolt and a shock when a pair of giddy parents drag up to the nursery their giggling, tipsy guests, who into the face of the baby wheeze their foul-smelling breath as they lift him with uncertain hands and drool over him in a fashion that inevitably frightens him and excites an instinctive repugnance.
Is it possible to emphasize too strongly the importance of the first impressions left upon infancy by parents and home? I frankly doubt it. Yet otherwise smart people will imagine that education begins when the youngster packs his first school books in a brand new strap and wanders off to a classroom. Almost I am tempted to repeat that his basic education ends, rather than begins, at that moment.
“It is difficult for a child to be better than his home environment or for a nation to be superior to the level of its home life. In fulfilling its double purpose – the generation and formation of children – the home becomes a little world in itself, self-sufficient even in its youngest years. It is vital that you, as a mother or father, make of your home a training ground in character-building for your children, who will inherit the world’s problems. Home is a place in which the young grow in harmony with all that is good and noble, where hardship, happiness, and work are shared.” – Father Lawrence G. Lovasik, Catholic Family Handbook
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I have heard that even in the womb, the little one can hear, can sense if the mother is tense, worried, tired, happy. I know I talked out loud and sang to my little hidden babies during my pregnancies. Sometimes, I’d have to even tell them to settle down when it felt like they were doing summersaults in utero! I know they heard, I know they were affected by my moods. Sometimes a difficult birth can be a result of mothers being upset or scared. It is good to pray to Our Lady for her intersession for a happy labor and delivery. It helps to relieve the mom to know her heavenly mother is right beside her, ready to help. She’s in good hands with Our Lady who is ever listening, waiting for us to call upon her.🪻