patience; you
yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its
reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with
anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first
exercises in training character.

_Consider the future._ Each family is a social unit, a little world.
Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and
experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which
prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are
needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When
young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality,
under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life?
Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.
Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional
effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against
evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be
purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be
confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must
guide it.

When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the
feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the
situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that
not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of
conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always
help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he
may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay
with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own
temper.

Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, _train him in
self-control_. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply
our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the
largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is
the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is
the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of
society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a
better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the
immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike
service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not
acquir