Chapter XIII
Watchfulness
It is your sacred duty constantly and unremittingly to watch over your children. But you should so watch that they may not be aware of this constant vigilance on your part, for it would tend to make them hypocrites. Teach them to be always truthful and sincere. Strive always to know whither your children go, with whom they associate, and what they are doing. Fail not to require of them a strict account of all these points. Woe to you if you are ignorant of their whereabouts, of their actions, of the company they keep, or of the dangers to which their innocence is exposed! Some children repeatedly play truant from school and habitually neglect hearing holy Mass on Sundays and festivals, and their parents, because they are not watchful over them, never find it out!
Keep your children away from the streets, especially at night. Those children over whom there is little or no restraint soon lose their innocence, become vicious, and will at one time or another disgrace their parents and break their hearts, for, says St. Paul, “every one reaps what he has sown.”
Accustom your children to go to bed early and to rise early. Keep them from all bad and dangerous companions, from all sinful and dangerous amusements, and from whatever may prove injurious to their purity and innocence. To inspire your grown-up boys and girls with a love of home, do all in your power to make your home pleasant and agreeable to them. In the evenings join with them in their innocent mirth and pastimes, and from time to time allow them to invite some good and respectable companions to share their home amusements under your own eyes.
If you constantly scold your children, and especially if you are always finding fault with your older boys, you will thereby make home disagreeable to them, and in some manner drive them away from home at night in search of recreation and pleasure in dangerous places and among bad companions; hence, if your children are led astray and become uncontrollable, the blame will rest on yourselves.
Watch carefully over the reading of your children. Provide them with good Catholic books, papers, and periodicals, and with other works calculated to instruct them and improve their minds. Make your house pleasant and attractive by decorating it with pious pictures, paintings, and statues. Put up a neat little altar, before which you and your children may daily kneel in prayer,—and especially for night prayers, which should be recited by the whole household in common. Be sure to exclude from your house all unbecoming pictures and decorations, as well as all trashy novels and story-papers, and all books and periodicals dangerous to the faith and morals of your children. Let your house be the worthy dwelling of a true Catholic, capable of inspiring yourselves, your children, and your visitors with sentiments of devotion and the love of virtue. This will be a great help to you in the discharge of your sacred duty of constantly watching over your children.
Let each of your children have, as far as possible, a separate bed; at least you must never allow those of different sexes to sleep promiscuously together. This is a most important point. Carefully watch over the private actions of your children, lest they practise or contract some immoral secret habit which will bring on them both spiritual and corporal ruin. How often is this all-important duty neglected by even religious parents!
Do all in your power to bring up your children in perfect sobriety, and accustom them to control their appetites, and never to transgress the bounds of moderation in eating and drinking. It were even advisable and very desirable that the parents themselves should practise, and cause their children also to practise, total abstinence, as a safeguard against the frequent and abominable vice of intemperance, which is the cause and occasion of so much misery and crime. You should also strain every nerve to preserve your children from vanity, from all worldly spirit, from human respect, and from a fondness for sinful and dangerous amusements.
