One of the stiffest challenges parents face is how to keep their children morally upright. No doubt about it, it seems impossible for a parent to police all the avenues of moral temptation of youth in today's world —television, newsstands, schools, neighborhoods, even the unhealed moral weaknesses in the parents' own thought. Temptation comes.
But the parent needn't fear it. Human protective efforts may fail him. Yet practical, spiritually based activity revealed through Christian Science won't.
The parent can start morally arming his children by acknowledging spiritual truths. He can recognize that to be tempted is not itself to sin. After all, Christ Jesus was tempted—and that three times, after fasting forty days in the wilderness. For a youngster to be tempted is not the end of the world. A parent must school himself to meet the approaches of evil—immorality as well as simple naughtiness—to his offspring with a sense of proportion and utter calm. To flare up with moral indignation at a tempted child hinders the parent's effectiveness as a moral educator. It shows that the parent believes the temptation something real to be feared. In Christian Science the healing of sin or sickness must always begin with seeing error's nothingness.
