Chapter XXIV - Things To Remember Page 03
CHILDREN AND BUSINESS
When you send your children to school it is that the training there received may qualify them to fight the better the ceaseless life battle.
Of course, we should not regard all education from a business viewpoint. Money apart, learning is its own greatest reward.
It widens the horizon at every step, and lifts the soul into strength and a profounder worship. But it will not do to overlook the business side of the training which the child should receive in school and out of it.
It is all very well to teach children the sources of the family revenue and the way to secure it. It is right that they should be impressed with the dignity of labor and trained in the ways of earning money, but it is far more important that they should be taught how to spend money, so as to get the most good from it, once it is earned.
The boy or girl is in a safe way to learn self-control and build up character when he or she, with some nickels at command, can pass a candy or a fruit shop without being compelled to spend their cash assets.
Children, wherever it is possible, should be given opportunities for earning money, which they can feel is "really and truly" their own.
They should not be made to feel that the money is not actually theirs, to do with as they please, but they should be taught self- denial, and that they must not get rid of their earnings by the purchase of things not needed.
On the farm, children unconsciously learn much through occasional work and constant observation, but away from the farm, boys and girls are apt to know little or nothing of the work in which the father, the bread winner, is engaged.
Where it is possible, the children should be made familiar by actual contact with the father's work.
This knowledge may never be used, still it will have value as a factor in the child's training, for in our modern life all business is inter-related.
Let the youngsters know something about banks by entrusting them there when old enough.
Teach them to keep accounts of their own little money affairs, their earnings, their expenditures, and their balances.
If they should borrow, even a cent, see that they return it at the time agreed on. Impress on them the fact that debt is a burden which it is well to get rid of as soon as possible, if one would stand erect and be entirely free.
All this can be quietly inculcated into the mind of the child without making him old-fashioned or miserly. The more he knows of the world the more he can enjoy it in a wholesome way.