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The Importance of Setting a Good Example
BY FR. FERREOL GIRARDEY
Example is more powerful than precept. Therefore, parents, it is your sacred obligation to conduct yourselves in a way that your children can look up to you as models both in the social life and in the practice of the Christian virtues.
They should be able to discover in you sufficient grounds for believing that there is nobody in the world so industrious, so temperate, so upright, so truthful, so virtuous, and so worthy of their respect and confidence as their own dear father and mother.
But your children, who, in their childhood, are more acute than they are supposed to be, must actually perceive in you good reasons for forming so exalted an opinion of you. Your conduct should, then, be such as to win and deserve their good opinion and esteem and convince them that you are their worthy models, their best friends, their most disinterested advisers, in whom they may place all confidence, to whom they may securely and advantageously entrust all their most hidden secrets, and whose advice they may safely ask and follow.
Strive always to act so that your children may revere and cherish you so much that they never undertake anything of importance without your consent and are always ready to make any sacrifice rather than displease, disappoint, or cause you pain. ■
Taken from: Popular Instructions to Parents on the Bringing Up of Children, by Fr. Ferreol Girardey. The book was published in 1897 and is in the public domain.
