Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home — A Reader’s Guide

There was a time when, in the speech of the Apocryphal teacher of wisdom men strove for the prizes that were undefiled. But the prizes of the card table are not only defiled but defiling. They fill the lives of women not a few with mentally hurtful and morally enervating excitement. The substitution of the delirium of the gaming table for the durable satisfactions of life that come from worth-while intellectual pursuits is ever a disaster. What manner of children are to be reared by a generation of bridge-experts, of women half-crazed with the pleasures of the card-table, to whom no prize of life is as precious as the temptation of bridge-whist. I recently heard the recital of a bit of conversation between parent and child: "Mother, is card playing terribly important?" "Why do you ask?" "Well, I went to see my aunt and she was playing cards with three friends, and, when grandmother came into the room, no one rose to meet her. So I thought that the game must be awfully important and the prizes very fine or they would have arisen when grandma entered, wouldn't they?"

Even if there were no fear of later conflict, it would still be the duty of parents to give themselves to children, that is to have something to give, to make something of themselves that their gift be worth while. And for the giving of self there can be no substitute though one may reinforce oneself in many ways. Parents cannot give themselves to children vicariously. A young woman, mother of a little one which I had expected to find with her, calmly answered my inquiry touching the child, "A child's place is with its nurse." One begins to understand the tale of the little girl who declared that when she was grown she wished to be a nurse so that she might be with her children. There may be and are times when a child's place is with its nurse if the household be burdened with one, but to lay it down as a general rule that a child's place is always apart from its mother and by the side of its nurse is to disclose the manner of maternal neglect in the homes of many well-circumstanced folk. I have said before that Lincoln is to be congratulated rather than commiserated with upon the fact that he had little schooling and no nurses, seeing that in the place of schools, teachers, nurses, governesses, he had a mother and the immediacy of her unvicarious care.

Unless parental-filial contact be direct rather than intermediate, parents cannot help a child to be as well as to have and to do, to live as well as to earn a livelihood. Parents can give a child little or nothing until they learn that a child is more than a body or intellect, a body to be fed and clothed, a mind to be furnished and trained. When parents come to remember that a child is, not has, a soul to be developed, they will cease to stuff their children's bodies and cram their minds while starving their souls. How often, alas, do parents pamper their children in their lower nature while pauperizing their higher nature, because of their failure to see that not alone were they co-authors of a child-body but that they are to be the continuing re-makers of a child's mind and spirit.

Are there quite enough parents like the father of a friend into whose young hands at leave-taking from home his father placed a Bible and a copy of the poems of Burns with the parting word,--Love and cling to both, but if you must give up the Bible cling to Burns. But verily we can give nothing more to our children than clothes and food and money until we remember to make something of ourselves. It is not easy for the stream of domestic influence to rise higher than the parental level. Time and again I have heard a father exclaim: "I am going to leave my boy so well off that he won't have to shoulder the burdens which all but crushed me." Less often have I seen a father so rear his son that he revealed his inmost purpose to be the fostering of his son's nobleness. Are there as many parents who would have their children finely serviceable as highly successful?

THE OBLIGATION OF BEING