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Celebrate Mother's Day 2010 Sunday and Every Day of the Year
by Reed Markham
05/07/2010 — Mary Miller, author of THE SCHOOL BOOK concluded: “Only a mother -those apologetic words minimize a job that determines the shape of the world as forcefully as any job in history. Can you imagine Isaac Newton describing his work by saying- I only sit under apple trees, or Benjamin Franklin by stating- I only fly kites? Gravity and electricity changed the way we understand the world, but being a mother changes the world itself."
The strong impact mothers have is hardly news. St. Augustine announced their importance over sixteen hundred years ago as he looked around at the pagan world of barbarism surrounding him. Remembering the gentle teachings that his mother whispered to him as a child, he longed for the kinder world she enabled him to visualize. Give me other mother she cried out, and I’ll give you another world! Although a look at the world today suggests that few have heeded St. Augustines’ plea, the message rings as true as ever: A mother shapes the character of her child, and her child shapes the character of the future.
In this century Hans Selye, after devoting a lifetime to research on stress and coping was asked: Can you isolate any single factor that determines what a person becomes?’ Without hesitation he replied, "His mother.”
It is during this time of year that the lives of America’s mothers are celebrated. Consider for a moment the impact of mothers on education:
Mothers educate children to become responsible adults. A recent radio broadcast included the following observations: “How are children and youth best trained to be responsible, mature, contributing adults? There is little questions that a good and loving family is the ideal setting for a child to grow, to learn, to be molded; and at the heart of the family is the mother. It follows, then, that no one serves the community, the nation, or the world better than the caring mothers who caress the babies of the world; the mothers who rock the worried child to sleep, who wipe the fevered brow, who give so much and ask so little.”
A mother is a child’s first teacher. According to Sidney Lesson, author of RAISING BRIGHTER CHILDREN, “Whenever the question of educating children is raised, thoughts usually turn to school and to schoolteachers- an unfortunate association of ideas, for mothers are, and have always been, their children’s first and most important teachers. What mothers teach, or fail to teach, intentionally or unintentionally, profoundly influences their children’s entire lives. Home is, in a practical sense, currently and traditionally, a child’s first school. Here, a child’s learning pattern is established; here the seed is planted, or not, for advanced education. And here each child acquires an assortment of strengths and advantages, or handicaps and vulnerabilities, that predispose him to success or
failure, to happiness or unhappiness.”
In an age when mothers are devalued they deserve even more of our praise, support and thanks. Mothers should be remembered not only on Mother's Day, but every day of the year.
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