[Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young by Jacob Abbott]@TWC D-Link bookGentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young CHAPTER XX 10/13
If he is a man of high and honorable sentiments, and especially if he looks forward to future years when his children shall have arrived at maturity, or shall be approaching towards it, and sees how important and how delicate the pecuniary relations between himself and them may be at that time, he will feel the importance of beginning by establishing, at the very commencement, not only by means of precept, but by example, a habit of precise, systematic, and scrupulous exactitude in the fulfillment of every pecuniary obligation.
It is not necessary that he should do any thing mean or small in his dealings with them in order to accomplish this end.
He may be as liberal and as generous with them in many ways as he pleases, but he must keep his accounts with them correctly.
He must always, without any demurring or any excuse, be ready to fulfill his engagements, and teach them to fulfill theirs. _Possible Range of Transactions between Parents and Children_. The parent, after having initiated his children into the regular transaction of business by his mode of managing their allowance-fund, may very advantageously extend the benefits of the system by engaging with them from time to time in other affairs, to be regulated in a business-like and systematic manner.
For example, if one of his boys has been reserving a portion of his spending-money as a watch-fund, and has already half enough for the purchase, the father may offer to lend him the balance and take a mortgage of the watch, to stand until the boy shall have taken it up out of future savings; and he can make out a mortgage-deed expressing in a few and simple words the fact that the watch is pledged to him as security for the sum advanced, and is not to become the absolute property of the boy till the money for which it is pledged is paid.
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