Cheerful Homes Make Happy Children

It requires gay courage to hide the vicissitudes of the day beneath a smile, but your child will get his example of courage or weakness from you. You are the source of his supply. If you let immediate disappointment befog your vision of success you’re vacillating, negative attitude is the pattern your child sees and adopts.

Tuning in With Our Children

“I am so happy I don't know what to do,” said a child to me this morning. “Father has had wonderful luck in his business and mother doesn't have the headache now, and our home is the happiest place in the world.” How susceptible children are to environment! They are bouyant or depressed according to the mood parents reflect. If we are neurotic or worry-ridden they are neurotic or worry-ridden and they are filled with fear complexes for children are more keenly imaginative than we adults.

For that reason if parents discuss the successes and failures of a business day at home they should do so with confidence and optimism or exercise extreme caution about what is said in the presence of their impressionable young folk.

In a home where father expresses pessimism and mother expresses worry the child easily becomes an apostle of failure, for the people in whom he has most confidence have undermined his belief in success.

It requires gay courage to hide the vicissitudes of the day beneath a smile, but your child will get his example of courage or weakness from you. You are the source of his supply. If you let immediate disappointment befog your vision of success you’re vacillating, negative attitude is the pattern your child sees and adopts.

The lives of great men reveal that crowning success is usually the culmination of a series of seeming defeats. It is defeat analyzed and adjusted to overcome the handicaps. The father referred to in this instance didn’t succeed on luck. His effort in adjusting his business to undermined his belief in success.

His effort in adjusting his business to make it pay dividends had succeeded after many serious reverses. He didn't quit trying and so he found the right combination. And it is a happy combination, indeed, that has affected his entire family. It has cured mother’s nervous headaches, and set a morose child to singing the praises of a happy home.

Every home should be the happiest place in the world to its child members. It will be a happier place for grownups as well as when we learn to emphasize our capacities for success and to minimize our defeats as transitory obstacles which courage and effort can dispel. – James Samuel Lacy, 1929

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