Parent Chief Duty

Keep in mind that to

“educate” means to help form

a child’s mind, character, or

physical ability. Education

encompasses all that you do to

cultivate, nourish, and train

your child as a person.

I love Charlotte Masson ideas about parent chief duty.  She told us that the first is to understand that bringing up and educating your child is the most important job in society. Not only in the school but but far more in the home, because it is more than anything else the home influences brought to bear upon the

child that determine the character and career of the future man or woman

Then, to form in our child right habits of thinking and behaving “By ‘education is a discipline,’ we mean the discipline of habits, formed definitelyand thoughtfully, whether habits of mind or body” I agrred with her. I believede tht this is the min lesson for our young children. Just delay your writing and reading acalculating until your children is well behave

Then Nourish your child’s mind with loving, right, and noble ideas. Now that life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it grows upon ideas. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food. The child has affinities with evil as well as with good; therefore, hedge him about from any chance lodgment of evil ideas. In saying that ‘education is a life,’ the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum

In the early days of a child’s life it makes little apparent difference whether we educate with a notion of filling a receptacle, inscribing a tablet, moulding plastic matter, or nourishing a life, but as a child grows we shall perceive that only those ideas which have fed his life, are taken into his being; all the rest is cast away or is,

like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury

Then Masson remind us to  Make sure everything you give your child is wholesome and nourishing,including the atmosphere in which he grows. The parents’ chief care is, that that which they supply shall be wholesome and nourishing, whether in the way of picture-books, lessons, playmates, bread and milk, or mother’s love.

Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes; he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all his life long they excite that ‘vague appetency towards something’ out of which most of his actions spring. Oh, wonderful and dreadful presence of the little child in the midst!

That he should take direction and inspiration from all the casual life about him, should make our poor words and ways the starting-point from which, and in the direction of which, he develops—this is a thought which makes the best of us hold our breath. There is no way of escape for parents; they must needs be as ‘inspirers’ to their children, because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet, the thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long ‘appetency’ towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine