Teasing Children | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Sep 11, 1879

Teasing Children.

TEASING children is at best a doubtful amusement; but when sensitive childhood is made the object of it, it degenerates into cruelty. Yet there are some very good people who indulge in this outrage against the innocent and helpless. We know people who never miss an opportunity to torment a child. It seems impossible for them to come near one without making it miserable. They cannot be at their ease, unless the child is suffering from heartlessness. As a consequence, children soon learn to hate as well as fear them, and no wonder. It is true that these people would shrink from inflicting needless bodily pain on any little one; but they never think of the keener torture which their senseless teasing inflicts on the sensitive child. They would tell you that they do nothing which should give pain; that they are only in fun and the child ought to know it. When they threaten to swallow a child, they don't mean to do it, of course; but the child is irritated or frightened all the same. Do they know how very real all such things are to a child, particularly to one that has never been hardened to such cruelty? They may mean nothing by their silly threats, but the child that has learned to rely implicitly on what its parents say—and all children should learn this—will accept as truths what its tormentors mean as lies invented for its annoyance. It is true that the child will in time learn to doubt the truthfulness of those who thus abuse it; but while it learns to distrust the false, it also learns to distrust the true. A child cannot be expected to exercise discrimination; and you, sir, who give it its first lessons in falsehood, are to blame for such subsequent distrust of things that ought to be believed.

Childhood should be a period of joyous innocence. It is no time for doubts or misgivings. They come soon enough with the entrance of the youth upon the scenes of busy, practical, anxious struggle for self-maintenance. Then, good friends, you who thoughtlessly mar that innocent enjoyment and implicit trust which characterize the uncorrupted child, stop to think what you are doing. You are committing a grave offense. You are ruining the temper of one whose mind is yet so plastic as to yield to every touch. You are darkening the days of one whose life should yet be all sunshine. You are inflicting the keenest of pains on one whose innocence should shield it from the tortures even of barbarians. You are poisoning the morals of one that is yet too young to resist your evil influences. You are doing wrong for which you can never atone, a wrong whose evil effects may follow that child to the grave.—Phrenological Journal.