Counsels for the Church - Ellen G. White

Do not let your children see you with a clouded brow. If they yield to
temptation, and afterward see and repent of their error, forgive them just as
freely as you hope to be forgiven by your Father in heaven. Kindly instruct
them, and bind them to your hearts. It is a critical time for children.
Influences will be thrown around them to wean them from you, which you
must counteract. Teach them to make you their confidant. Let them whisper
in your ear their trials and joys. By encouraging this, you will save them
from many a snare that Satan has prepared for their inexperienced feet. Do
not treat your children only with sternness, forgetting your own childhood,
and forgetting that they are but children. Do not expect them to be perfect or
try to make them men and women in their acts at once. By so doing, you will
close the door of access which you might otherwise have to them, and will
drive them to open a door for injurious influences, for others to poison their
young minds before you awake to their danger.
Never Correct a Child When Angry
If your children are disobedient, they should be corrected. Before
correcting them, go by yourself, and ask the Lord to soften and subdue the
hearts of your children and to give you wisdom in dealing with them. Never
in a single instance have I known this method to fail. You cannot make a
child understand spiritual things when the heart [the parent's heart] is stirred
with passion.
You should correct your children in love. Do not let them have their own
way until you get angry, and then punish them. Such correction only helps
on the evil, instead of remedying it.
To manifest passion toward an erring child is to increase the evil. It
arouses the worst passions of the child and leads him to feel that you do not
care for him. He reasons with himself that you could not treat him so if you
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