There is a phase in a child's development which is familiar to many parents and provides food for thought in considering our progress as we ourselves grow up in the understanding of Christian Science.
This particular phase comes when a little child is eager to do things for himself. "Let me do it" has been the call to many a busy mother to exercise patience and to recognize that this is a natural and necessary development, one to be encouraged and cherished. Wisely she will realize that it is not such a very serious thing if the first attempt to button up a coat unaided results in wrongly matched buttonholes!
Well-meaning or impatient interference with those first attempts could well hold up for a time the child's progress toward proper independence. There has probably been many a mother who, seeing the glowing satisfaction of achievement reflected in her child's face, has curbed the impulse to rebutton the coat herself. Instead she has praised the attempt and rejoiced in this evidence of progress. Experience teaches that the child's budding sense of the fitness of things will spur him on to master the task. He will surely work out for himself that each button needs a matching buttonhole.
