Teach children tolerance. No one need surrender his or her own beliefs while extending tolerance to those with other beliefs.
One of the great compliments paid the Savior was that he taught as one having authority. The missionary who knows scripture and can quote it speaks with the voice of authority...May I suggest that in our family night gatherings we make it a project to memorize one scripture a week pertinent to this work. At the conclusion of a year our children will have on their lips a fund of scripture which will remain with them throughout their lives.
It is the home which produces the nursery stock of new generations. I hope that you mothers will realize that when all is said and done, you have no more compelling responsibility, nor any laden with greater rewards, than the nurture you give your children in an environment of security, peace, companionship, love and motivation to grow and do well.
Coming closer to home, there is so much of jealousy, pride, arrogance, and carping criticism; fathers who rise in anger over small, inconsequential things and make wives weep and children fear.
Behold your little ones. Pray with them. Pray for them and bless them. The world into which they are moving is a complex and difficult world. They will run into heavy seas of adversity. They will need all the strength and all the faith you can give them while they are yet near you. While they are young, pray with them that they may come to know that source of strength which shall then always be taught of the Lord' and great shall be the peace of thy children.
You need more than your own wisdom in rearing [your children]. You need the help of the Lord. Pray for that help and follow the inspiration which you receive.
In terms of you happiness, in terms of the matters that make you proud or sad, nothing-I repeat, nothing-will have so profound an effect on you as the way your children turn out. You will either rejoice and boast of their accomplishments or you will weep, head in hands, bereft and forlorn, if they become a disappointment or an embarrassment to you.
Do the best you can. And remember that the greatest asset you have in this world is those children who you've brought into the world, and for whose nurture and care you're responsible.
Love is the very essence of family life. Why is it that the children we love become so frequently the targets of our harsh words? Why is it that these children who love their fathers and mothers sometimes speak as if with daggers that cut to the quick? "There is beauty all around," only when there's love at home.
If your child's gonna be a star it's going to happen and just let it happen.
To find someone who loves your children like you do is really rare.
Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.
But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work.
I don't read anything about myself. As a child, there was something in me that was just instinctive. I want to be clear in my spirit, and I don't want to be blocked by things that get inside of you and kill you.
An album is like a child and after a while I was ready to give birth!
Sadomasochiasm - which we know very well doesn't exist in societies that don't have child abuse - is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression.
A lot of the people who are supposed to be enforcing the crime, enforcing the law, are also criminals. They've suppressed something in their childhood and they don't want to think they themselves were sexually abused as children or they are abusing their own children and they're sitting on a bench and they either can't admit it, won't admit it, depending on how deeply buried it is.
When you stand up for yourself and try to be autonomous and self-determining, you're called a lot of names that we all know and that are very common. You may lose your job. You may lose custody of your child. You may be blamed for the failure of your marriage even though it was the man who couldn't tolerate an equal relationship.
Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.
When I was growing up, you were supposed to marry and therefore didn't plan ahead. Planning ahead is one of the few reliable measures of class in the sense that rich people plan for generations forward and poor people plan for Saturday night, and by that measure, women have been lower class. We were less likely to plan ahead because we're more likely to think that who we marry and our children are going to dictate our plans.
They're all qualities wrongly called feminine: attention to detail, patience, empathy. I don't have children, but I was raised as a female to have those qualities because they're perceived as feminine. Until men are raised with those qualities, too, they won't have the full circle of human qualities.
We've demonstrated in modern countries or industrialized countries that women can do what men can do, but we have not demonstrated that men can do what women can do therefore children are still mostly raised, hugely mostly raised by women and women in industrialized modern countries end up having two jobs one outside the home and one inside the home.
The women's movement and gay and lesbian movements always come together, and our adversaries are always the same because the male supremacist, patriarchal, ultra-right-wing, religious fundamentalists, whatever you want to call it is devoted to saying that sex is only moral and okay when it is directed towards having children and occurs in patriarchal marriage, so the children are owned.
Sexuality has always been for humans a form of communication, a way we express love and caring and bonding, not only a way we have children if we choose to.
If we have reproductive freedom, that is the ability to decide for ourselves when and whether to have children and what happens to our bodies, sexism can be reversed. It's the understanding that it's not inevitable. I think that is crucial.
