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How to Raise Tom Sawyer
Posted 12 Feb 10
I happen to be reading The American Frugal Housewife this week (I found it at the library, but a Project Gutenberg version, nicely formatted, is here). First published in 1833, the handbook was popular throughout the nineteenth century. Not just a window into how people lived 150 years ago, it also has advice that anyone might find useful today.
Not the recipes, I’m sorry to say; most begin with some variant of “Boil three hours.” Nor the medical recommendations (though I do like this one: “the constant use of beer is a preservative against fevers”).
But Mrs. Child does have relevant advice for modern society in one area: parenting.
In this country, we are apt to let children romp away their existence, till they get to be thirteen or fourteen. This is not well. It is not well for the purses and patience of parents; and it has a still worse effect on the morals and habits of the children. Begin early is the great maxim for everything in education. A child of six years old can be made useful; and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others.
Children can very early be taught to take all the care of their own clothes.
They can knit garters, suspenders, and stockings; they can make patchwork and braid straw; they can make mats for the table, and mats for the floor; they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market.
Provided brothers and sisters go together, and are not allowed to go with bad children, it is a great deal better for the boys and girls on a farm to be picking blackberries at six cents a quart, than to be wearing out their clothes in useless play. They enjoy themselves just as well; and they are earning something to buy clothes, at the same time they are tearing them.
As I announced at breakfast this morning, things are going to change in this household!
This post indexed as: Personal, Reading