Words for families to live by

Perhaps you’ve never heard of Dorothy Law Nolte, but you’ve likely seen her most famous -- in fact, her only famous -- work. It might even be hanging on your fridge as it has for decades in millions of family kitchens around the world. Titled “Children Learn What They Live,” the poem begins:

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.

Ever since Nolte wrote the poem 50 years ago, it has been copied and passed from friend to friend; it has been printed on postcards, scrolls and posters, distributed by PTA groups, by pediatricians and by hospitals as a gift to new parents. It has been used by teachers and clergy in parenting classes, and has turned up in 30 languages, in textbooks and framed on walls.

And most of this without Nolte being credited, without her permission, even without her knowledge. Certainly, without royalties. In fact, for 44 years -- from 1954, when she wrote the poem for a small Torrance newspaper, until 1998, when she published a book based on, and including, the poem -- Nolte says she never even knew it was all that popular, let alone revered.

Now, at 81, she knows for sure. In Japan, especially, she’s become a household word ever since Crown Prince Naruhito held a press conference earlier this year at which he was asked how he intended to raise his 3-year-old daughter.

In response, the prince referred to Nolte and her poem, which he called “wonderfully eloquent” and which he said had touched him “profoundly.” He came across it in a Swedish textbook, he told reporters, and it embodied all the important factors “that are so easy to forget in today’s society.” He then read the 12-line poem in its entirety to his nationwide audience, spiking sales of her book, “Children Learn What They Live: Parenting to Inspire Values,” past the 1.5 million mark in that country.

The irony of all this is not lost on Nolte, who has lived quite anonymously (and modestly) for eight decades in Southern California, a product of the land and the era into which she was born -- before women’s lib, the Me Generation and intellectual property lawyers worked their wonders. It is a land she extols in the banner that hangs outside her brilliantly whitewashed Orange County cottage, with its impeccably lush greenery: “Proud to Be an American.” (She bought the house six years ago, partly with proceeds from that first book, she says.)

Nolte is a small, sturdy woman of exceptional vitality. She can’t sit still for very long, hopping up from her kitchen table at intervals to elongate her muscles in smooth, graceful movements that seem syncopated to music only she can hear. She is, among other things, a “movement awareness” specialist -- a discipline she says she doesn’t think she should take the time to explain.

In fact, her entire interview with a member of the American press is something of a surprise to her. (She’s gotten used to Japanese interviewers, she says; they’ve been appearing at her door since the prince’s comments.) “Do you think we ought to go back through all this history?” she asks, while serving a chicken sandwich to her guest. “Well, yes, that’s why I’m here,” her visitor answers. She looks amused. And perhaps a bit flustered.

She has, after all, lived a long and gratifying life -- two husbands, three children, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren. She has held multiple jobs (as varied as saleswoman at the Broadway and psychological counselor) -- most of it with no thought of (and no income from) the poem. “I simply wrote it and put it out there, where it has apparently moved throughout the world on its own momentum.”

She has been through a divorce from her first husband (“He was a very nice guy; I was simply ready for a different experience”), and widowhood when her second husband died in 1988. One of her children has survived brain cancer.

And then there’s that poem, which has become the basis for two more books: “Teenagers Learn What They Live,” published in 2002, and “Families Learn What They Live,” which is in the works. All three were written with Nolte’s longtime colleague Rachel Harris and published by Workman, and all were based on that single poem, which has begun churning out income for her, in addition to making Nolte something of a celebrity -- a fact she seems not yet to comprehend.

The mist of years has obscured the exact chronology of what happened with the poem, she says apologetically. “I can’t tell you the exact timing of anything to do with it. I never paid much attention after I wrote it. I noticed that my daughter, who was about 9 at the time, came home from school with the PTA newsletter about a month after I wrote it, and my poem was printed in there. I was very surprised.”

After that, she says, she lost track of the work for about 18 years, until 1972, when she learned that Ross products, the division of Abbott Laboratories that makes Similac, Pedialyte and other baby nutrition products, was distributing her poem to new parents through pediatricians and hospitals. At that point, she says, she copyrighted the work, met with Ross officials and gave them rights to continue using her poem.

“We became great friends.” Did they pay her? “I think maybe they did, but I really can’t remember. It was not significant. Money wasn’t the issue,” she says. “I was just so happy my poem was out there in the world.”

Margot Herrera, Nolte’s editor at Workman, says her research in the late ‘90s, when she was preparing Nolte’s first book, indicated that Abbott Labs alone had probably distributed between 10 million and 20 million copies of the work. “But that is such a small part of where this poem has gone ... ,” she says. “It struck an extraordinary chord with millions. I saw it on a fridge when I was visiting in Guatemala.”

Nolte was born in Los Angeles in 1924, graduated from Los Angeles High School and became a salesperson at the Broadway for a few years, until she married and started having kids.

She stopped working to raise them, she says, and to study. “I was just trying to educate myself further; I had no formal path.” At night, when her husband, an electrical repairman, was at home, she worked at a hospital. The family moved to Orange County and she stayed with hospital work until the late ‘40s, when “I started branching out.”

She began what turned out to be a 20-year process of more focused education, she says, studying religious psychology through the University Without Walls program, held a variety of jobs at counseling centers, where she learned as she worked, and she began giving parenting classes through her women’s club in Torrance. She became a part-time counselor at a Methodist church in Redondo Beach, and even took some private clients.

In the midst of all this, in 1952, she began writing a column called Creative Family Living for the now-defunct Torrance Herald.

“Readers would send questions, and I would answer them in the paper,” she recalls. But one day, she was up against her deadline and no questions had come in from readers. “I sat down at the typewriter and my mind was blank. So I just kinda closed my eyes, then opened them and I typed ‘Children Learn What They Live.’ And then I just went on from there. I just wrote what came out, what was in my head and my heart. It was my column for the next week.”

What was in her head and heart went on to include:

If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.

If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.

If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.

If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.

“The editor accepted it and ran it in the paper,” she says. “I forgot about it, and went on to do the next week’s work and everything else I always did.”

By the mid-1990s, Nolte had become aware that her poem wasn’t just being given away and passed around. It was being sold as well.

In Asia, it was ornately printed on scrolls hawked at fairgrounds, she says, its authorship attributed in the title to “The Learning of the American Indian.” In Florida, a man claimed he had written the poem.

Since it seemed so popular, she decided to elaborate on its message in a book with a chapter devoted to each line.

Herrera says the 1998 book has been reprinted in 19 countries and 18 languages. “It is an enormous bestseller, especially in Japan.

“And I understand why, because I have three kids, ages 11, 8 and 6, and I have learned a lot about parenting from it. About role modeling and generosity and compassion. And about positive spin. I learned, for example, not to say, ‘Don’t drop it,’ but to say, instead, ‘Hold it carefully.’ Little things I wouldn’t necessarily think about unless someone made me think.”

Nolte is about to make her fourth trip to Japan, for book signings and perhaps a first meeting with the crown prince. She is writing poetry, which she self-publishes. She is thinking about her next projects, she says, which may or may not include yet another book spun off from her singularly successful poem.