Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and HappinessBeecher, Catharine Esther
General
Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Cooking; Home economics
In regard to the intellectual training of young children, some
modification in the common practice is necessary, with reference
to their physical well-being. More care is needful in providing
_well-ventilated_ school-rooms, and in securing more time for sports in
the open air during school hours. It is very important to most mothers
that their young children should be removed from their care during
certain school hours; and it is very useful for quite young children
to be subjected to the discipline of a school, and to intercourse with
other children of their own age. And, with a suitable teacher, it is
no matter how early children are sent to school, provided their health
is not endangered by impure air, too much confinement, and too great
mental stimulus, which is the chief danger of the present age.
In regard to the formation of the moral character, it has been too
much the case that the discipline of the nursery has consisted of
disconnected efforts to make children either do, or refrain from doing,
certain particular acts. Do this, and be rewarded; do that, and be
punished; is the ordinary routine of family government.
But children can be very early taught that their happiness, both now
and hereafter, depends on the formation of _habits_ of submission,
self-denial, and benevolence. And all the discipline of the nursery
can be conducted by parents, not only with this general aim in their
own minds, but also with the same object daily set before the minds
of the children. Whenever their wishes are crossed, or their wills
subdued, they can be taught that all this is done, not merely to please
the parent, or to secure some good to themselves or to others; but
as a part of that merciful training which is designed to form such a
character, and such habits, that they can hereafter find their chief
happiness in giving up their will to God, and in living to do good to
others, instead of living merely to please themselves.
It can be pointed out to them, that they must always submit their will
to the will of God, or else be continually miserable. It can be shown
how, in the nursery, and in the school, and through all future days,
a child must practice the giving up of his will and wishes, when they
interfere with the rights and comfort of others; and how important it
is early to learn to do this, so that it will, by habit, become easy
and agreeable. It can be shown how children who are indulged in all
their wishes, and who are never accustomed to any self-denial, always
find it hard to refrain from what injures themselves and others. It
can be shown, also, how important it is for every person to form such
habits of benevolence toward others that self-denial in doing good will
become easy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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