Editorial October 28, 1967 Issue

Blueprint for Parents

Helen Wood Bauman

Christian Science provides a blueprint for parents, a program of action whereby children may be educated in a direction that will make them good citizens and willing to conform to laws civil and divine. Once parenthood is achieved, responsibility for educating the offspring should be accepted in a spirit of joy and with plenty of energy. Mary Baker Eddy says, "All education is work."^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 289;} But nothing in the human scene is more interesting and rewarding than work that brings out in a child the qualities of God, Spirit, that characterize the real child, spiritual man, made in God's likeness.

Parents who know the truth of man, practice it consistently in their own lives, and also teach their children to revere and treasure it generally find their efforts rewarded by seeing their children become God-loving, law-abiding adults. These young people have glimpsed what they really are.

If parents observe in a young child a tendency to insubordination, an instinct to lie or steal or hate that might grow into active criminality in later years if not destroyed, they will need to work with special care to conquer this instinct. Otherwise it could develop into stubborn blindness to good and something worse than childish naughtiness. Any affinity for evil is foreign to God's child, His image, and can be obliterated on the basis of its falsity.

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