Children

Children are a great comfort in your old age—and they help you reach it faster too.  ~~  Lionel M. Kauffman

Children are the only earthly possessions we can take with us to heaven.  ~~  Robert C. Savage

Most things have an escape clause—but children are forever.  ~~ Lewis Grizzard

Many years from now it will not matter what my worldly possessions had been. What will matter is that I was important … in the life of a child.

Horace Mann, in the early days of the colonies, was asked what a certain little Christian chapel was worth. He replied philosophically, “A million dollars if through it one boy is saved.” It is recorded that one of the board members protested, “That’s too much to pay for just one boy.” The old educator stuck to his guns, saying, “Not if it’s my boy that you save.”

How suggestive are the captions of recent magazine articles on children, written by leading educators, psychiatrists, and psychologists: “The First Five Years Shape All of Life”; “Behavior Is Set by Five”; “Baby’s First Year Is the Growingest”; “Train Citizens in the Cradle”; “Don’t Wait for the School Bell”; “Age Five Is Old Psychologically”; “Combat Crime in Infancy.”  ~~ Walter B. Knight

• Benjamin S. Bloom, professor of education at the University of Chicago, made this startling statement: “By the age of four, a child has formed half the intelligence he will have at maturity.”
•  Socrates said, “Could I climb to the highest place in Athens, I would lift my voice and proclaim—fellow-citizens, why do ye turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and take so little care of your children, to whom one day you must relinquish it all?”
•  It is easier and better to build boys than to repair men.

In her provocative article, “You Can Raise Your Child’s IQ,” Maya Pines challenges parents to help raise their children’s intelligence “in the crucial early years when it is most malleable.” She claims that three things must be accomplished in the home in order to help raise a child’s IQ; namely, “stimulation in infancy, early language activities, and preparation for reading.”  ~~  Shirley M. Denver

John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson pitying James Madison’s childlessness. As many fathers before and since have said, Adams noted that while children often cost parents grief, anxiety, and even vexation, their very presence lightens and lengthens life.
   Agnes Newton Keith would agree. It was horrible to be a mother in the Japanese internment camps—more horrible than even the mothers could say. Yet, in a way, it was heavenly too, she wrote. In the midst of that deprivation there were thirty-four reasons for staying alive—every one a child. Describing how the mothers brought all of thirty-four safely through the tragedy, Agnes added, “I said to begin with that we brought them all through alive. But perhaps they brought us through alive.” Indeed, a child is someone worth living for, and the joys they bring more than compensate for the emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and economic costs of raising them.
   God, too, experiences both the pain and sometime pleasure of fatherhood. But, truth to tell, if earthly fathers experienced an infinitesimal amount of the frustration and disappointment God experiences with his spiritual children, birth control would never have to be taught anywhere in the world. Governments, like the Romans under Augustus, would be paying parents to have children, not discouraging them from parenthood. Only an infinitely patient Father in Heaven could not only tolerate but love the wayward children his Son’s death has acquired for him.