This week my four year old granddaughter was playing with dice from our toy cupboard. She told us that she had built a tower that would not fall down, because she had carefully given it a good foundation.

I was delighted to see that the parables she learned in Come Follow Me study with her parents and her Primary class had been clearly understood and applied. She really was building on a firm foundation of gospel learning.

I’m so glad her parents haven’t waited until she was “old enough to understand” gospel principles to teach them in their home. They know how important it is to arm children with faith and belief and comfort before the world gives them doubt and trials and pain.

Proverbs 22:6 says “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”  My dad used to remind me, when I worried about my teens, that there’s no promise about what the child will do in between when he is trained and old! There’s both comfort and truth hidden in his humor. 

Everyone has agency. But parents who provide a firm foundation of truth and love are often, soon or late, able to see their children stand on it.

~Nita Smith