Letters to a Daughter

Letter 1: Introductory

MY DEAR CHILD: Only a parent’s heart can truly understand the profound responsibilities that come with raising a child. If a father has any human feeling at all (much less Christian compassion), he cannot watch his beloved child step into adult life and begin a journey toward eternity without asking himself what that child’s condition might be in the years to come. And unless I’m mistaken, there are particular reasons why a parent should feel especially concerned when contemplating a daughter’s situation during this critical period. Beyond all the other factors that make her an object of deep interest (factors she shares with sons), she depends on parental guidance to a greater degree than they do. There is a kind of natural vulnerability in her position that, apart from the nurturing care of those who brought her into being under God, makes an appeal to a parent’s heart that no one with any feeling at all could possibly ignore.

If I said that ordinary parental concern played a role in my decision to write these letters to you, I would be telling the truth, but not the whole truth. Your circumstances, while not unique to you alone, have been especially suited to give you a high place not only in my affections but also in my sympathies. Through God’s wise but mysterious plan, I watched your mother taken from you at an age when you couldn’t possibly understand her love or what you had lost. At that same moment, I found myself looking for the last time at the cold body of a beloved wife while listening to the unconscious but piercing cries of a motherless child. While I will always remember that moment with emotions I cannot put into words, I can never fail to connect it with a memory of God’s goodness in arranging the circumstances of your infancy so favorably, and in giving you, in due time, another mother who considers it a privilege to do everything she can to make you good, useful, and happy. You will immediately understand that the circumstances I’ve just mentioned could hardly fail to awaken a deep and lasting interest in a father’s heart. I assure you they have had much to do with my decision to write the following letters.

To help you understand how important these topics are, I need you to remember something: who you are at eighteen or twenty is probably who you’ll be for the rest of your life, allowing for changes in circumstances. In other words, your character will most likely have taken a fixed direction by that time, a direction that will last through every season of prosperity and hardship until your final day. This direction will influence and control all your prospects for comfort, respectability, and usefulness in this life. More than that, it will determine whether your eternal future shines with immortal glory or darkens with endless despair. I know there are exceptions to this observation, but I appeal to the records of human experience. I appeal to anyone who has carefully studied this subject: isn’t the general truth exactly as I’ve stated? In the vast majority of cases, a young woman’s character at the end of her education is formed for life, and therefore formed for eternity. I’m confident this reality, if you truly grasp it, will make you care deeply about every effort (especially every parental effort) to guide you toward virtue and happiness.

I know that much has been written on the subjects I’m about to address, and by writers far more capable than I am. Still, I feel compelled to say that most of the books I’ve encountered, written specifically for young women, seem to me either lacking in some important areas of instruction or containing views on certain points that any thoughtful Christian parent would have to reject. I’m not suggesting that I expect these letters to fill all the gaps or fix all the errors of those who have written before me: I only promise that the views I share will be ones that, after careful thought and (I hope I can say) sincere prayer, seem to me consistent with reason, experience, and Scripture. I have no desire to say anything that appears new or striking. My entire goal is simply to give you straightforward parental advice on topics that remain important long after they’ve lost their novelty. And there’s one thought I find particularly meaningful: though you might read a stranger’s writings with indifference, you will read these letters with attention and perhaps benefit, even when the heart that writes them has stopped beating and the hand that pens them has turned to dust.

I hardly need to tell you that my first wish and most fervent prayer for you is that you may remember your Creator in the days of your youth. Unless you embrace the gospel as a system that both redeems and purifies (in other words, unless you become a practical follower of the Lord Jesus Christ), it would profit you nothing in the end, even if you possessed every other accomplishment that could adorn your character or recommend you to the world. As these letters progress, I will focus on the subject of practical religion with some degree of detail, and I want you to remember clearly that while I direct your attention to other subjects, they are all subordinate to this. To see you walking in the truth and keeping the commandments of God will, more than anything else, gladden the heart of

Your affectionate

FATHER.

Letter 2: Early Friendships

MY DEAR CHILD: The development of the social instinct is one of the earliest signs of human nature. This, combined with our capacity for affection, forms the foundation of friendship. We find, therefore, that strong attachments often exist between children long before their judgment has developed enough to decide what qualities should define a true friend. A glance at your own brief experience will convince you that it has followed this pattern of our condition. When you look back on your childhood, you will find that you have formed many friendships without much discrimination, some of which may have already given way to others, while some, perhaps, may continue to the evening of life.

The importance of early friendships can be measured by how much they shape our character. Anyone who has thought about human nature or looked at real-world outcomes knows this influence must be enormous. We are naturally creatures of habit, highly susceptible to the power of example. While many childhood impressions fade as we mature, the ones that stick become woven into the fabric of who we are and turn into our most powerful motivators. Anyone who carefully examines their own character, or who knows intimately how others developed theirs, will find plenty of evidence for how real and far-reaching this influence is. Who hasn’t heard, when seeing parents’ hopes destroyed by a ruined and miserable child, that it was the tragic result of bad early friendships? And who, on the other hand, hasn’t watched with joy as a good friendship gently shaped the developing mind and heart?

If friendships formed early in life carry this much weight, you’ll immediately see that choosing your friends should be a matter of careful deliberation. While your earliest attachments will naturally arise from circumstances beyond your control, those formed after childhood can benefit from judgment and reflection. One rule you should never ignore: don’t offer your confidence too quickly, and don’t agree to unreserved intimacy with anyone until you’ve gained a thorough knowledge of their character. Disregarding this rule will lower the value others place on your friendship, expose you (at minimum) to charges of poor judgment, and quite possibly lead to many more serious problems. You can safely assume that considerable suspicion should attach to declarations made by those who have had little opportunity to know you. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect that a friendship resulting from genuine acquaintance will be a lasting source of pleasure and benefit.

When it comes to the character of your particular friends, I hardly need to say that you shouldn’t expect to find people who are free from imperfection or sin. Remember that they share with you a common humanity: they belong to a race of fallen beings. It would be strange indeed if there weren’t occasions, both on your part and theirs, for mutual patience with each other’s weaknesses and mutual forgiveness of each other’s mistakes. Nevertheless, when selecting your friends, you can safely set your standard as high as is consistent with our present fallen state. You should never unnecessarily form a close friendship with someone whose example, on the whole, you wouldn’t choose to follow. The reason is obvious: the tendency of such a friendship to make its participants alike is so strong that there’s little chance, in any given case, of resisting it.

One quality that’s extremely important in a close friend is a pleasant temperament. Everyone knows how much of life’s unhappiness comes from the proud, irritable, and unkind attitudes of those we’re even remotely connected with. Naturally, the problem grows worse in proportion to how close our relationship with them is. A person with an unpleasant temperament was never made either to enjoy or to give the highest pleasure that friendship offers. Even if someone like this is sincerely attached to you and genuinely wants to promote your happiness, it would be very strange if your interactions with her weren’t frequently poisoned by hasty or unkind words. I advise you, therefore, when selecting your friends, to pay particular attention to their natural disposition. As a general rule, don’t admit to your unreserved confidence anyone who would be likely to often hurt your feelings, and whose emotions are not (and cannot be) suited to the enjoyments of a refined friendship.

Another quality you should look for in close friends is a good and well-developed mind. I don’t mean you need to insist that a friend possess extraordinary genius or have achieved great things in science or literature. There’s a vast difference between these accomplishments, which relatively few people attain, and the kind of intellectual emptiness that creates a real barrier to any pleasant or useful relationship. One important goal you should have in forming close friendships is the development of your own understanding. Beyond the opportunities for growth that come from open conversation, it would clearly be wrong to spend as much time as these friendships require without contributing anything to the strength or development of your intellectual abilities. If your closest companions are people of good sense and reasonable education, you can hardly avoid gaining some intellectual benefit from spending time with them. You’ll breathe an atmosphere that will work almost invisibly to strengthen your mind’s powers. But if, on the other hand, you spend most of your time with people whose minds are less capable and whose opportunities for mental growth have been very limited, you’ll not only lose significant benefits, but it would be surprising if your own mind didn’t gradually begin to reflect the weakness and emptiness it constantly encounters.

When choosing your friends, you should also look for discretion. This quality is completely different from brilliance, but even though it’s less impressive, it’s probably more important for both happiness and usefulness. Many women with brilliant and cultivated minds have sacrificed their own reputations and their friends’ comfort through indiscretion. If your closest friends have this flaw, the harm to you will be double: you’ll share in the unhappiness they frequently bring on themselves, and you’ll often find yourself embarrassed and confused because of their poor judgment. Never let yourself be drawn to someone as a friend just because they seem eccentric. In almost every case, you’ll find that eccentricity comes with some kind of indiscretion, and wherever this exists to any significant degree, it will be enough to poison even the closest friendship. Choose friends who have a reputation for being prudent and wise. It’s better for them to have these qualities than every artificial accomplishment.

When it comes to choosing your particular friends, I want to add one more thing: it’s extremely important that they be people who take religion seriously and let it shape how they live. As you form friendships (just as in everything else), you need to remember that you’re an immortal being who will give an account of your life, and you need to keep your preparation for the next world in view. Nothing will more effectively prevent or destroy all serious spiritual impressions than unrestricted contact with shallow and careless people. Whatever other appealing qualities such people may have, you can be certain that the simple fact that they treat religion with mockery or indifference is reason enough why they shouldn’t be your close friends. In fact, the more charming they are in other ways, the more you should fear their influence as companions, because they would surround an irreligious life with that many more dangerous attractions. Let your close friends, therefore, be at least people who pay conscientious attention to religious duties. And if they have deeply experienced religion’s power, you should consider that an added benefit. If you use this privilege wisely, you won’t find yourself at the end of your life regretting that your closest companions were people of outstanding godliness. But if you choose friends of the opposite character, you have every reason to fear that the memory of it will poison your final hours with useless regrets.

Let me offer some advice worth keeping in mind: don’t have too many close friends. Here’s why. Meeting all the demands that many intimate friendships would create would take too much of your time and would inevitably interfere with your other responsibilities. You wouldn’t gain any advantage from having many close friends that you couldn’t get just as well from a smaller circle. In fact, the more you extend the number beyond a reasonable limit, the more you’ll undermine the very purposes that friendship is meant to serve. It’s simply impossible, by the nature of things, to give the same level of trust and affection to a large number of people as you can to a few. Since the benefit you receive is, to some degree, proportional to the strength and closeness of the friendship, it’s clear that the more close friends you have, the less satisfaction and benefit you can expect to receive. It’s equally true, on the other hand, that the more people you offer your confidence to, the less your confidence will be valued in each individual case. There’s no exception here to the general rule that things are cheap in proportion to how common they are. Be content, then, with a few carefully chosen friends, and don’t try to become the confidant of everyone you know.

Another suggestion closely connected to the one I just made is that you shouldn’t be fickle in your friendships. Don’t hastily give up one friend for the sake of gaining another. Wherever this tendency shows up, it’s sure to provoke disgust and make people suspicious of any future claims of friendship you might make. Be as cautious as you want when forming your attachments, but once they’re formed, never let them be broken unless you can justify it to your reason and conscience. A single instance of unreasonably deserting a friend would damage your character in a way that time could scarcely erase, or future faithfulness repair.

It only remains for me to suggest a few hints about how your interactions with your friends should be conducted. That you should treat them with a high degree of confidence is implied in the fact that you’ve extended to them a particular friendship. Never wound them by any unreasonable expressions of distrust, or by withholding from them anything they have a right to know. Be particularly careful not to excite curiosity by dropping a hint about subjects which, for whatever reason, you don’t feel willing to fully explain. Such mysterious allusions often excite painful suspicions in the mind, and have more than once been instrumental in separating close friends. It would be too petty a consideration, for which to wound the feelings or expose yourself to the loss of a valued friend, that you might be amused by watching the common operations of curiosity.

While I want you to be open and honest with your friends in ways that match the closeness of your relationship, I also want you to avoid the opposite mistake: sharing everything you happen to know without thinking it through first. As you interact with a judgmental world, you’ll inevitably hear comments about your friends’ characters that, however harmless they might seem, would cause real pain if repeated back to them. Make it your rule, then, never to pass along negative reports to a friend unless you genuinely believe doing so will somehow lead to something good. A significant portion of the damaging rumors circulating in society can be traced back to casual gossip rather than any deliberate intent to slander. If you relay every critical thing you hear to the friends it concerns, you’ll often wound them deeply even when no one actually meant to attack their character.

I would also say that in your interactions with each of your friends, you should maintain careful discretion about what others have shared with you in confidence. Your duty requires that you treat the trust each person places in you as sacred, and none of them can reasonably expect you to betray another friend just to satisfy their curiosity. If you have several close friends who aren’t themselves close to each other, you need to remember that when you reveal to one person a secret that another has entrusted to you, you’re violating a basic principle of good friendship. No matter how much you trust the judgment and integrity of the person you’re telling, you’re clearly claiming a right that isn’t yours: the right to spread information about someone’s private affairs beyond what you have reason to believe she intended or wanted. And the situation isn’t really different even when the friend who confides a secret to you and the friend you tell are close to each other. There might be many reasons why it would be better that a third person, however friendly, not know something, reasons that wouldn’t apply to you. And in any case, your friend doesn’t feel (and shouldn’t have to feel) when she entrusts a private matter to you, one in which perhaps she alone has a stake, that she’s thereby giving up the right to decide whether it gets shared with others. You should therefore treat the secrets of each of your friends as a separate and independent trust that you must faithfully and sacredly honor.

There is one duty of great delicacy that you may sometimes be called to in your relationships with your friends: the duty of reproof or correction. Though I’ve advised you to set your standards high in selecting your close companions, and to choose those you believe to be the best models of character, you shouldn’t be surprised to find them sometimes in the wrong. Nor should you make every flaw you notice in them a subject of criticism. At the same time, there’s no question that occasions may arise which will not only justify, but absolutely require, that you take on the role of someone who corrects. On such occasions, to remain silent would be a serious violation of the obligations of friendship. There was a mutual pledge implicitly given when your friendship was formed: that you would faithfully work to promote each other’s best interests. And you certainly don’t fulfill this pledge if you allow serious errors to pass without correction. The great secret of carrying out this duty successfully is to choose the right time and place, and to do it in a spirit of gentleness and affection. Whenever you take on this role, instead of appearing to have abandoned the character of a friend and putting on an air of cold severity, you should let every expression and look show that you are, if possible, more under the influence of genuine friendship than ever. If you only succeed in making it clear that the reproof is the honest expression of true kindness, you’ll be in little danger of failing in your purpose. But if you unfortunately leave the impression that it came from personal irritation, or from an unreasonable misunderstanding of your friend’s conduct, it would be strange indeed if you achieved a good result.

In general, I would say that you should make all your interactions with your friends as profitable as you can, both for yourself and for them. It’s almost inevitable that the friendships you form will become a source of either great good or great harm. If the time you spend with your close friends is devoted primarily (as it should be) to improving your mind and character, you will never look back on it without approval. But if, on the other hand, you waste it on frivolity and vanity, and if those you care about most are helping you kill hours that were meant for better purposes, then you have reason to expect that the friendships you’re forming now, instead of bringing blessings, will poison your moral sense and pile up anguish for your dying hour.

Your affectionate FATHER.

Letter 3: Education — General Guidance

MY DEAR CHILD: In this letter and several that follow, I plan to give you my views briefly on the subject of education. I say briefly because the subject is so vast and has so many important connections that one could hardly do it justice in anything short of an extended treatise. I will limit myself to the suggestions I think may be most useful to you as you pursue your own education.

I want you to remember, first and foremost, that the main goal of your education is to help you use the abilities God has given you in ways that honor Him most. You owe every noble gift you possess to the same Being who gave you life. You depend on Him to preserve those gifts as well, and reason itself tells us they should be used in His service. But these abilities clearly have the potential for significant development, and without that development they can never fulfill their intended purpose. Education, then, has two aims: to develop your abilities and to direct them properly. It exists to draw out the energies of your soul and channel them toward glorifying your Creator. In other words, it exists to make you as useful as you can possibly be.

Given this understanding of education’s purpose, it seems impossible that anyone, especially a Christian, could disagree. Yet everyone knows that in educating girls, even this basic principle has been routinely ignored, and often by parents who claim to base all their decisions on Christian duty. This fundamental mistake appears most clearly when parents substitute what they call an “ornamental” education for a substantial one: they care more about shaping their daughter’s appearance than developing her mind. The result? Many naturally talented girls emerge into the world after years of expensive schooling with nothing to show for it except remarkable skill in using their hands and feet. But don’t women possess the elevated capacity for reason just as much as men do? Where has God indicated that this gift should be carefully cultivated in one sex while being left wild and barren in the other? Suppose the sexes don’t share identical roles in every respect. Suppose men are meant to occupy the more prominent positions in society, while women have their place assigned primarily within the private sphere of home and family. This might justify conducting their education somewhat differently, but it can never justify allowing a woman’s mind to decay through neglect or molding her into an entertaining, lively toy. If we believe men’s minds should grow and strengthen through exercise, then we must also believe women’s minds deserve similar development. Otherwise, the closest and most tender relationship in life (which should mean the deepest possible sharing of interests and feelings) becomes instead an unequal and unnatural alliance between intellectual sophistication and intellectual poverty.

You can see, then, that we can’t achieve the goals of female education without carefully developing the intellect. And let me emphasize that this must include the intellect in all its capacities: perception, judgment, memory, reasoning ability, and so on. This matters not only because each of these faculties has its own distinct role, and to the extent that any one of them is allowed to lie dormant or gets misdirected, the purpose for which it exists is thwarted. It also matters because these different faculties depend on one another, and like the parts of a finely tuned machine, they work most properly and most effectively when carefully balanced. It’s certainly true that we should respect the particular makeup of each mind, and that it should be trained to exert its greatest efforts through its strongest capacities. Nevertheless, you have no right to neglect any of your faculties, and even the weakest among them should be developed at least enough that your mind can achieve its proper and balanced proportions.

It’s also important, if you want to reach the true goal of education, that you choose a path combining both specific and general usefulness. In other words, the different subjects you study should be ones you can put to practical use while they also cultivate your mind as a whole and give you easy command of your own abilities. The most compelling way to view mental education is as a system designed to draw out your powers and move you forward from one level of strength to another. What good is it if you gain vast amounts of knowledge, but each new piece doesn’t represent a new degree of intellectual power? If that’s the case, you’re not reaping the legitimate fruit of your mental work. To achieve this important goal, train yourself in every subject to think independently. Let your mind freely think its own thoughts, and don’t be afraid to consider that the textbook itself (when it’s anything other than the Bible) might be wrong. I’m not trying to encourage intellectual arrogance in you: that would be disgusting in any young person, and in a young woman it would be intolerable. But the habit of modest curiosity that asks for a reason before agreeing with something, and that quietly pushes its questions beyond authority (or even against authority), always deserves praise. This habit is better suited than almost any other to give you both knowledge of your powers on one hand and command of them on the other.