John Reid lost his son Dakota following a deadly car crash last year. The 16-year-old had been a passenger in a car when it was struck by another vehicle and John took the decision to donate his son’s organs to help save others.

Dakota's family had no idea where his organs would be going, but recently a box turned up at their door addressed to John. Opening it, John discovered a toy bear sent from a man named Robert who had received his son's heart, with a note reading, “I would have preferred to give this to you in person, but not sure when that would happen.”

The bear was dressed in a “Best Dad Ever” T-shirt and John pressed the bear's paw to hear the tear-jerking(催人泪下的) audio recording, his son's heart beating inside the man he had saved, John's wife Stephanie recorded the moving moment the dad was left in tears by the unbelievable gesture, sharing the video on a social platform with the caption: “The gentleman who received Dakota's heart sent John a bear with Dakota’s heartbeat, Thank you!”

Robert wasn't the only person the Virginia family’s selfless decision helped, John said he had also been contacted by a farmer who received his son's kidney, and a 21-year-old man who can now see thanks to Dakota’s eyes.

“When I got the bear, my heart was filled with joy. I did not expect any of this,” John said. “Thanks to Bob, I can listen to his heartbeat again,” John hopes the moving video helps spread the word of the importance of organ donation, adding: “It was so comforting and satisfying to know he lives on. It has helped us so much to know he helped save lives. It is the best cure and comfort I could ever ask for.”

The family is where a child learns words and their meanings. What you say and how you say it has an important effect on how your child will view himself and his world.【小题1】Their cries let the family know that they are hungry, tired or need to be held. The family is how a child learns to understand and to express his wants, needs, feelings opinions and ideas.

Include your child in conversations from the very beginning. Help him join in. At first the sounds are babbling(婴儿发出的咿呀声).【小题2】Families who include their children in conversation give their children important practice in communication and social skills, as well as a better chance for future success.

【小题5】From the time they are very young, they can tell when adults are distracted or not listening. If they think their part of the conversation is not being listened to, they will become mad.

All I had to do for the two dollars was clean her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, she had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.

I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.

Part of my pride in working for her was earning money I could squander (浪费): on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.

In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they were needed. They could earn money; they could care for children younger than themselves; they could work the farm, take care of the herd, run errands (差事), and much more. I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet...

Little by little, I got better at cleaning her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid she would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.

Still, I had trouble summoning (鼓起) the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands she made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

That was what he said. This was what I heard:

Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

Your real life is with us—your family.

You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, big-hearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.