There is some truth, no doubt, in this statement thus expressed, but it is not applicable to the case, for the reason that there is no need whatever for a mother’s “continually thwarting and constraining” her children in her efforts to establish her authority over them.  The love which they will feel for her will depend in a great measure upon the degree in which she sympathizes and takes part with them in their occupations, their enjoyments, their disappointments, and their sorrows, and in which she indulges their child-like desires.  The love, however, awakened by these means will be not weakened nor endangered, but immensely strengthened and confirmed, by the exercise on her part of a just and equable, but firm and absolute, authority.  This must always be true so long as a feeling of respect for the object of affection tends to strengthen, and not to weaken, the sentiment of love.  The mother who does not govern her children is bringing them up not to love her, but to despise her.

Effect of Authority.

If, besides being their playmate, their companion, and friend, indulgent in respect to all their harmless fancies, and patient and forbearing with their childish faults and foolishness, she also exercises in cases requiring it an authority over them which, though just and gentle, is yet absolute and supreme, she rises to a very exalted position in their view.  Their affection for her has infused into it an element which greatly aggrandizes and ennobles it—­an element somewhat analogous to that sentiment of lofty devotion which a loyal subject feels for his queen.

Effect of the Want of Authority.

On the other hand, if she is inconsiderate enough to attempt to win a place in her children’s hearts by the sacrifice of her maternal authority, she will never succeed in securing a place there that is worth possessing.  The children will all, girls and boys alike, see and understand her weakness, and they will soon learn to look down upon her, instead of looking up to her, as they ought.  As they grow older they will all become more and more unmanageable.  The insubordination of the girls must generally be endured, but that of the boys will in time grow to be intolerable, and it will become necessary to send them away to school, or to adopt some other plan for ridding the house of their turbulence, and relieving the poor mother’s heart of the insupportable burden she has to bear in finding herself contemned and trampled upon by her own children.  In the earlier years of life the feeling entertained for their mother in such a case by the children is simply that of contempt; for the sentiment of gratitude which will modify it in time is very late to be developed, and has not yet begun to act.  In later years, however, when the boys have become young men, this sentiment of gratitude begins to come in, but it only changes the contempt into pity.  And when years have passed away, and the mother is perhaps in her grave, her sons think of her with a mingled feeling excited by the conjoined remembrance of her helpless imbecility and of her true maternal love, and say to each other, with a smile, “Poor dear mother! what a time she had of it trying to govern us boys!”