Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's reading has been edited and adapted from Love's Way by Orison Sweat Martin, published in 1918.

Love is the great educator, the great unfolder of youth, as the sun is the only thing that will bring out the exquisite

beauty of fruits and flowers, so love is the only thing that will develop the sweetness

and the beauty of the child. It is the only power that will call out the true, the beautiful side of its nature.

It is only the hard, coarse, and unlovely qualities of the child that are developed by force and

repression. How often would a little kindness and forbearance on the part of a parent or guardian,

a little better knowledge of a child's nature, do wonders for a so-called bad child,

who is considered incorrigible or hyperactive, a fit subject for psychiatric drugs.

Benjamin Lindsay, a judge and social reformer who had, perhaps a better knowledge of the

nature of the growing boy and girl than any psychologist or expert in child study,

says, The child is a wonderful creature, a divine machine.

We have much to expect from them,

but they have much to expect from us.

And what they return depends largely upon what we give. Children instinctively admire the good and the beautiful.

They are natural hero-worshippers and they respond enthusiastically to stories of heroism,

high endeavor, loyalty, chivalry, all the highest and best instincts of humanity.

The noblest qualities are inherent in the child, but wrong training, suppression, nagging,

scolding, terrorizing, depriving the growing mind of the stimulus of good books, fine examples of living,

the starving of its body through insufficient or improper food.

All this may, and often does, turn what with proper training might have been a splendid boy or girl into a pitiable human wreck.

The destiny of the child hangs upon its early environment, its parents, teachers, and associates.

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