Teach Children Patriotism

Knowing what to teach your children, and when, and how, is no easy matter.

Now, it is being said that the first three years of a child’s life is the period in which he learns with the greatest ease. That being the case, this is the time to teach discipline, and honesty, and love, and kindness, and beauty, and how to say “Thank you,” and how to say prayers -- the important things.

And don’t forget patriotism. Patriotism? Teach patriotism to three-year olds? Sure!

Didn’t Betty Tillery tell in one of her recent Hedgehopper articles how this past summer she and her husband (Colonel George Tillery) taught their two-year-old granddaughter, Allison, to recognize the U. S. Flag and to say “’Merican Flag! ‘Merican Flag!” each time she saw it?

Of course toddlers can learn about the Flag. There’s no need to bother their sweet little heads with long explanations of the 50 stars and the thirteen stripes and what they mean. But you can teach the red, white, and blue. And that this is the flag of our Country.

If you think about it, Fort Rucker is a wonderful place for small, and older, children to have their first flag lessons. Any day of the week you can drive or walk with them to the parade ground and show them the big flag flying there.

And, the Chapel of the Flags, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Division Road, is always open. There, you may introduce your children to the 2 flags we hold to be the most wonderful banners in all the world: The United States Flag, the Christian Flag, and the 50 flags of the 50 states. (The state flags are arranged in the order in which the states were admitted to the Union.)

What a child hears his mother sing stays in his heart forever. So, as you cradle your little fellows in your arms, and rock them to sleep, sing the words of “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful” or the old and lovely “My Country ‘tis of Thee.” Place the last verse of “America,” which as you will recall goes:

“Our father’s God, to thee, Author of Liberty, to thee I sing. Long may our land be bright, with Freedom’s holy light, protect us by the might, Great God our king.”

When your children are older, introduce them to poems and other pieces of literature that are patriotic in tone and meaning. One such selection, by Sir Walter Scott, has these famous lines:

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land?

Whose heart hath ne-er within him burned

As home his footsteps he hath turned

From wandering on a foreign strange soil?”

(That may be a bit deep for children. But next time you and your family come home to the U. S. A. from an overseas tour, see if it doesn’t mean much to you.)

The Boston Hymn, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, carries an ideal lesson on what Freedom in America means. It tells of God speaking to the Pilgrims.

Perhaps at Thanksgiving time when your school-aged youngsters are studying about our Pilgrim fathers, you could read, or let them read, this hymn. The stanzas are:

“The Word of the Lord by night to the watching Pilgrims came,

as they sat by the seaside, and filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more;

Up to my ear the morning brings the outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball a field of havoc and war,

Where tyrants great and tyrants small might harry the weak and poor?

My angel -- his name is Freedom -- Choose him to be your king;

He shall cut pathways east and west, and fend you with his wing.”

Years ago, in 1918 to be exact, writers Lyman P. Powell and Gertrude W. Powell published a book titled “The Spirit of Democracy,” and for it they gathered many patriotic selections. In the preface they quoted The American’s Creed.

See if your teen and sub-teen children like it. The last paragraph, tell them, is the answer to why their dad wears the uniform. The creed reads:

“I believe in the United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of sovereign States; a perfect Union, one and inseparable, established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.

“I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it; to support its Constitution; to obey its laws; to respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies.”

You will agree, will you not, that it is the duty of American mothers to their children to love them, to show them the “’Merican Flag,” and to teach them all that it stands for.

Published November 1985. Click your browser’s “Back” button to return.