The nursery is also intellectual.  The mind of your child is unfolding as well as its body; and hence the former, as well as the latter, demands the nursery.  How much of the mental vigor and attainments of children depend upon the prudent management of the nursery.  Hence parents should

                      “Exert a prudent care
  To feed our infant minds with proper fare;
  And wisely store the nursery by degrees
  With wholesome learning, yet acquired with ease. 
  And thus well-tutored only while we share
  A mother’s lectures and a nurse’s care.”

Parents may abuse the minds of their children in the nursery, either by total neglect, or by immature education, by too early training and too close confinement to books at a very early age, thus taxing the mind beyond its capacities.  This is often the case when children betray great precocity of intellect; and the pride of the parent seeks to gratify itself through the supposed gift of the child.  In this way parents often reduce their children to hopeless mental imbecility.

Again, parents often injure the minds of their children by their misguided efforts to train the mind.  Even in training them to speak, how imprudent they are in calling words and giving ideas in mutilated language.  It is just as easy to teach children to speak correctly, and to call all things by their proper names, as to abuse their vernacular tongue.  Such mutilations are impediments to the growth of the intellect.  The child must afterwards be taught to undo what it was taught to do and say in the nursery.  But as this subject will be fully considered in the chapter on Home Education, we shall refrain from further comment here.

The nursery is moral and spiritual.  The first moral and religious training of the child belongs to the nursery, and is the work of the mother.  Upon her personal exhibition of truth, justice, virtue, &c., depends the same moral elements in the character of her child.  In the nursery we receive our first lessons in virtue or in vice, in honesty or dishonesty, in truth or in falsehood, in purity or in corruption.  The full-grown man is the matured child morally as well as physically and intellectually.  The same may be said of the spiritual formation and growth of the child.  Spiritual culture belongs eminently to the nursery.  There the pious parent should begin the work of her child’s salvation.

From what we have now seen of the nursery, we may infer its very common abuse by Christian parents in various ways.  They abuse it either by forsaking its duties, or giving it over to nurses.  The whole subject warns parents against giving over their children to dissolute nurses.  What a blushing shame and disgrace to the very name of Christian mother, it is for her to throw the whole care and responsibility of the nursery upon hired and irreligious servants.  And why is this so often done?  To relieve the mother from the trouble of her children, and afford her time and opportunity to mingle unfettered in the giddy whirl of fashionable dissipation.  In circles of opulent society it would now be considered a drudgery and a disgrace for mothers to attend upon the duties of this responsible department of home.  But the nurse cannot be a substitute for the mother.