31 Days of Favorite Quotes: Difficult Children

This passage is from Charlotte Mason’s School Education, but I think it is an encouragement – and challenge – to any parent, and perhaps especially to one (like me) who feels they have either failed in child training in the early years or have a particularly difficult child.

Let us not despise the day of small things nor grow weary in well-doing; if we have trained our children from their earliest years to prompt mechanical obedience, well and good; we reap our reward. If we have not, we must be content to lead by slow degrees, by ever-watchful efforts, by authority never in abeyance and never aggressive, to ‘the joy of self-control,’ the delight of proud chivalric obedience which will hail a command as an opportunity for service. It is a happy thing that the ‘difficult’ children who are the readiest to resist a direct command are often the quickest to respond to the stimulus of an idea.

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