Flowers for the Women Wearing Veils - Volume I — Page 191
! ! 191 and weaknesses. For example, sometimes parents bring certain food in to the house when the child is ill. If he eats the food, the child is likely to become further unwell. When the child demands that particular food, they will say , ‘W e never brought it home ,’ even though the child is fully aware of the truth. Regardless of the fact that the parents believe they are not lying and that ‘ it is for the child’s own good ’ , there is no doubt that they are lying and indirectly teaching the child to lie. Sometimes they will not deny that the food is in their home, but they will say they have already eaten it, when the child is fully aware that this is false. O r they will claim that someone took it or that the food was spoiled. However, the child k nows that no one took the food and neither did i t spoil. T h e food was brought into the house and the parents secretly finished it, which the child observed from behind a curtain. He learns to lie through the practice of his parents and the vice no longer holds any weight [in the child’s mind]. H e begins to lie because even though his parents forbade him from lying, they themselves told lies when necessary, therefore the child thinks that it cannot be such a bad practice. Likewise , stealing is another vice. Compared to lying, it is my opinion that parents more consistently instill the practice of stealing within their children, as if they are sp ecifically tuto r ing them. For exampl e, at times parents do not wish to give their child something , but do so upon the child’s insistence, and then surreptitiously hid e it from the m. Perhaps, morally speaking, this act cann ot be called theft because they quietly repossessed that which was theirs in the first place, and which had never been intended for the child. How ever, this creates a notion in the child ’s mind that this is something that can be resorted to and so he will also begin to hide things. The result of such parental behavior is that a child can pick up the habit of stealing far more easily from his parents than picking up the habit of lying. Therefore, the first necessary rule parents should follow when training their children is to refrain from adopt ing such manners and presenting their own weaknesses in such a way that [inadvertently] draw s the child’s attention towards vice. I have noticed that the second limitation in the upbrin ging of