All this is very well.  Advice given under such circumstances and in such a way produces, undoubtedly, a certain good effect, but it does not tend at all to bring the father and son together.  But if, instead of giving this common-place advice, the father asks—­supposing it to be winter at the time—­“Which kind of skates are the most popular among the boys nowadays, James?” Then, after hearing his reply, he asks him what his opinion is, and whether any great improvement has been made within a short time, and whether the patent inventions are any of them of much consequence.  The tendency of such a conversation as this, equally brief with the other, will be to draw the father and son more together.  Even in a moral point of view, the influence would be, indirectly, very salutary; for although no moral counsel or instruction was given at the time, the effect of such a participation in the thoughts with which the boy’s mind is occupied is to strengthen the bond of union between the heart of the boy and that of his father, and thus to make the boy far more ready to receive and be guided by the advice or admonitions of his father on other occasions.

Let no one suppose, from these illustrations, that they are intended to inculcate the idea that a father is to lay aside the parental counsels and instructions that he has been accustomed to give to his children, and replace them by talks about skates!  They are only intended to show one aspect of the difference of effect produced by the two kinds of conversation, and that the father, if he wishes to gain and retain an influence over the hearts of his boys, must descend sometimes into the world in which they live, and with which their thoughts are occupied, and must enter it, not merely as a spectator, or a fault-finder, or a counsellor, but as a sharer, to some extent, in the ideas and feelings which are appropriate to it.

Ascendency over the Minds of Children.

Sympathizing with children in their own pleasures and enjoyments, however childish they may seem to us when we do not regard them, as it were, with children’s eyes, is, perhaps, the most powerful of all the means at our command for gaining a powerful ascendency over them.  This will lead us not to interfere with their own plans and ideas, but to be willing that they should be happy in their own way.  In respect to their duties, those connected, for example, with their studies, their serious employments, and their compliance with directions of any kind emanating from superior authority, of course their will must be under absolute subjection to that of those who are older and wiser than they.  In all such things they must bring their thoughts and actions into accord with ours.  In these things they must come to us, not we to them.  But in every thing that relates to their child-like pleasures and joys, their modes of recreation and amusement, their playful explorations of the mysteries of things, and the various novelties around them in the strange world into which they find themselves ushered—­in all these things we must not attempt to bring them to us, but must go to them.  In this, their own sphere, the more perfectly they are at liberty, the better; and if we join them in it at all, we must do so by bringing our ideas and wishes into accord with theirs.