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A WORD TO FATHER
[Moore’s Rural New Yorker, 24 July 1858]
We 
have read a story of a little boy who, when he wanted a new suit of clothes, begged his mother to ask his father if he might have it. The mother suggested that the boy ask for himself. “I would,” said the boy, “but I don’t feel well enough acquainted with him.” There is a sharp reproof of that father in the reply of his son. Many a father keeps his children so at a distance from him, that they never feel confidentially acquainted with him. They feel that he is a sort of monarch in the family. They feel no familiarity with him. They fear him, and respect him, and even love him some, for children can not help loving some everybody about them, but they seldom get near enough to him to feel intimate with him. They seldom go to him with their little wants and trials. They approach him through the mother. They tell her everything.-They have a highway to her heart on which they go in and out with perfect freedom. In this keeping-off plan fathers are to blame. Children should not be held off. Let them come near. Let them be as intimate with the father as with the mother. Let their little hearts be freely opened. It is wicked to freeze up the love-fountains of little one’s hearts. Father’s do them an injury by living with them as strangers. This drives many a child away from homes for the sympathy his heart craves, and often into improper society. It nurses discontents and distrusts which many a child does not outgrow in his lifetime. Open your hearts and your arms, fathers; be free with your children; ask for their wants and trials. Play with them; be fathers to them truly, and then they will not need a meditating between themselves and you. -Valley Farmer
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