Misunderstanding a Child.-How easily is a child misunderstood because parents apply an adult standard to his doings! The following may be quoted from an article written by Miss Ellen M. Haskell, years ago, to illustrate the point (Case 73):

Reminiscences sometimes disclose the fact that the conduct of children is grossly misinterpreted by adults. The writer of the last-quoted record relates that one summer day she went to a wood-lot on her father's farm to spend an hour in being a fairy. To aid her fancy she went without her dress, her neck and arms being thus uncovered. On her return she was seen by her father, who somewhat sternly ordered her into the house to put on her dress. His manner made her feel that she had behaved in a manner unbecoming to a modest girl, and an hour of grief and shame followed her innocent and poetic enjoyment. The readiness to think evil of children arises, in part, no doubt, from the great desire on the part of parents that their children shall be free from faults and vices, but also in part from a forgetfulness of their own youth. A bad motive is attributed to a child simply because in an adult a bad motive would underlie a similar act, when in truth the child is utterly incapable, intellectually, of the conceptions involved.

Truthfulness and Obedience.-Truthfulness and obe dience are thought to be the prime virtues of children. But if you find your child to be lying to you, do not be promptly excited and indignant. First investigate the possible cause. Lying may be due to a phase in the child's physical development; it may be the result of a vivid imagination unguided by the power of discrimination. There are many other causes of lying. Perhaps your child is timid, and easily frightened; perhaps he uses a lie to defend himself against your own violent temper.

And obedience? In the strict sense of this word the

child does not owe us obedience at all. Obedience may be merely a mechanical response, born of timidity, fear, and moral weakness, and not at all a sign of moral strength and self-control. At best it is a habit produced by enforced practice. It is the parents' business to secure their children's ready response and co-operation by treating them fairly and squarely and by inspiring them with confidence and love. Disobedience is not infrequently the result of unsocialized instincts at a time in the child's life when these instincts are unorganized or disorganized; sometimes it is the product of misguided independence, and perhaps also an evidence of a strong moral will-power. Intelligent and loving treatment will usually forestall any cases of stubborn insubordination. A child who respects his parents will respect their directions. But parents who do not command such respect; those whose course with children is inconsistent, who forbid to-day what they allowed yesterday; who act merely on behalf of their own convenience and whim; who may be coaxed, or cried, into yielding, into recalling an order, or reconsidering a restriction; when the mother is indulgent and the father strict, or vice versa; parents who discuss their children and even quarrel over them in their very presence; those who cannot intelligently lead their children's activities into constructive outlets, so that they remain destructivesuch parents need not wonder that they have to contend with their children's disobedience, ill temper, and ugliness.

A True Family Government.-The discipline of the home must wisely adjust itself to the varying needs of growing children. The children must be taken into the confidence of their parents in proportion to their devel

opment of judgment, reliability, and efficiency. Out of a monarchical form of government the family must gradually emerge into a more democratic organization, in which the children are given respectful and sympathetic hearing, and in which their opinions and votes count. Individual conditions will be modifying factors. But the underlying principles must be those of freedom, mutual regard, and co-operation, on the basis of educational insight and adjustment. If parents would think less of their own convenience and self-gratification, if there were less of hysterical emotionalism in their relations to their children, and more consideration for what is needed to develop manliness, womanliness, citizenship, much misery and much perversion would be obviated.

Here we have also the measure of inefficiency for those homes where economic pressure, shiftlessness, poverty, illness, and the thousand and one conditions which produce the dissolution of the home spirit and home opportunity, deprive the children of the uplifting influences which can nowhere be obtained but in the home. How many children in this wide and rich country of ours have the right kind of home-or, for that matter, a home at all?

One of the principal requisites for wholesome home education is that there be a bond of mutual trust and friendship uniting parents and children. A parental and filial love which does not blossom out into unrestricted confidence is a spurious thing. Parent and child ought to need no mediator; no chum or schoolmate or chance companion ought ever to stand nearer the child's heart than his father and mother. The parents must always be their children's best friends; the children must know

that they will find sympathy, that they may weep at their parents' breast when they have erred, rather than be chided and repulsed; that they will be raised and lifted up to a higher level from their humiliation by confiding in those who have given them life. Parents, convert your children as soon as they are old enough into your companions and friends, and their new dignity will imbue them with a new spirit and enthusiasm which will help them to withstand many a treacherous temptation. Make their lives a part of your own life, right along from the time they were babes in swaddlingclothes, when they played their first innocent games, when they had their first doll, during the period of their school years, through the dangers with which the path. of adolescence is beset, away into the bliss of their own married life.

During the formative period of school life, secure the most cordial and close co-operation with the school your child attends. As a rule, parents imagine they have fulfilled their duty when they send their child to the public school, or to some private school which they have selected according to their own best light. But few really know, or care to investigate, what happens to the child at school, or by what standard they should gauge the child's progress. They are perhaps ready enough to criticise and find fault, but they rarely cooperate with the school in a constructive manner. Yet school life often reveals a phase of the child's nature of which the parents remain totally ignorant. Home and school are two factors in education which can never be absolutely separated; their course must not only be parallel, but connected and co-ordinated in numerous ways.

The True Home Spirit. In the home, mainly, the foundations of an ethical character are laid. "Home is not the place where we eat, sleep, and dress to go abroad," says Mortimer A. Warren in his valuable little book, "Almost Fourteen." "Home is the place where we share. We share not only food, shelter, and clothing, but we share a common name and blood, and common joys and sorrows. We cannot escape it if we would, and we would not if we could. The children cannot escape their inheritance, and the parents cannot escape their marriage vows."

The spirit of the home is the most potent educational factor. Make the home an ideal place, a place where love, sympathy, and justice reign supreme, where there is an atmosphere of refinement, enthusiasm, moral virtue, and strength; an appreciation of the beautiful, the noble and true; a readiness of moral courage and selfsacrifice, of simplicity, uprightness, and charity-and the children will absorb and assimilate this spirit, they will catch the inspiring infection.

This true home spirit will inevitably be based upon genuine religion. There must be, in the parents, a realization of the spiritual life which is the pivot of all phenomenal life in the soul of man; there must be a recognition of the eternal facts of creation which link us, one and all, inseparably to those infinite powers upon whose operation all life depends. Men have called these powers by different names, and different modes have been established, in the course of centuries, to worship them. The most sublime, and at the same time the most lovable of these conceptions of the eternal forces has been personified by generations of human souls under the sacred name of God. But even though, with some of