Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family.  One is to bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to remove the pain rather than to cure the ill.  The other is to regard the crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt, as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort of training.

Sec. 1.  THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION

The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins to take after his father.  The perfect character does not exist in a child.  It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the perfect tree in the sapling. Character comes by development; it is not born full-blown.  Childhood implies promise, development.  Therefore parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are pretty much like their neighbors’ children.  Outside of the old-time Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper, sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a psychopathic ward in some hospital.  Could anything be sadder than the picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always “good”?

When parents speak of the “natural depravity” of their children, they are commonly using terms they do not understand.  What they mean is the natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development.  The child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers.  The powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call physical and mental.  The family is the great human culture-bed for the development of those powers, their training-field and school.

Does someone say, concerning a little child, “But we thought he had the grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more do wrong”?  True, he may be born again, but there is a world of difference between being born and being grown up.  From one to the other, in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be learned.  Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and training that may make toward the matured life.  You have no more right to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him to be born six feet tall.

A moral crisis is a lesson.  The important consideration for the parent, then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition of the art of standing upright and walking forward.  Dealing with such an occasion one may well say to himself or herself, “This is my chance to guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way for the child’s weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it.”  For is it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the organizing of our different experiences?  Think whether it is so or not.  And is it not to be the same with the child?