Honey For A Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt

This book is an essential guide for parents who want to find good books for their children. A love of reading is the key to true learning. Train up a child in the way he should go is more than teaching him facts. It is to train the child's character, to give him high ideals and to encourage integrity. It is to provide largeness of thoughts, creative thinking, imaginative wondering - an adequate view of God and His world. The head does not hear anything until the heart listened and what the heart knows today, the head will understand tomorrow.

A child's basic needs are for milk and honey from parents. Milk is a symbol of care a child receives for his physical needs and honey is the sweetness of life, the special quality that gives the sparkle within a person. Good books are rich in honey.

What types of books?

·         Stories that make for wonder, for laughter.

·         Stories that stir one within with an understanding of the true nature of courage, of love, of beauty, stories that make one tingle with high adventure, with daring, with grim determination, with the capacity of seeing danger to the end.

·         Stories that bring our minds to kneel in reverence, stories that show the tenderness of mercy, the strength of loyalty, the respect for what is good.

·         Instead of pouring out so much knowledge on a child's soul that it is crushed, we should plant a seed of an idea that will develop from inside.

·         A good book is not problem-centred, it is people centred. It reveals how to be a human being and what the possibilities of life are - it offers hope.

·         Good literature has always dealt with truth but not in a way that makes man less. Good literature shows man how to be more.

Reading aloud and sharing a book demonstrates that stories are fun and books are friends. Parents who read widely together with their children are going to be those who most influence their children, who have the largest world view, who have an uncommon delight in what is good and true and beautiful - and an uncommon commitment to it. Sharing and feeling and talking together will come naturally. Books shared with each other provide that kind of climate.