Every difference between parent and child is somehow assumed to be rooted in and ascribable to the inherent perversities of the parental-filial relation. When scrutinized, these will often be found to be wholly unrelated thereto. Ever are parents and children ready to take it for granted that their clashing arises out of the relation between them when in truth, viewed dispassionately and from the vantage-ground of remoteness, parent and child are not pitted against each other at all. They are persons whose conflict has not the remotest bearing upon the relation that obtains between them. Would not much heartache be avoided, if parents and children clearly understood that the grounds of difference between themselves, however serious and far-reaching these sometimes become, are not related to or connected with the special relation that holds them together?
Thus the irritations of propinquity may not be less irritating when seen to arise out of the fact of physical contact rather than from the circumstance of intellectual antagonism or moral repulsion, but it is well to know that such irritations are not the skirmishes of life-long domestic war. I say "irritations of propinquity," for, excepting among the angels, the status of propinquity cannot be permanently maintained without at least semi-occasional irritation. Professor R. B. Perry,[F]dealing with domestic superstitions, declares, in reference to scolding: "The family circle provides perpetual, inescapable, intimate and unseasonable human contacts.... Individuals of the same species are brought together in every permutation and combination of conflicting interests and incompatible moods.... The intimacy and close propinquity of the domestic drama exaggerates all its values, both positive and negative."
Not only does the unavoidable persistence of physical contacts account, however unprofoundly, for occasional differences in the home, but anotherand parallel circumstance ought never to be lost sight of. There are two samenesses in the home, the sameness of blood and the sameness of contacts. Putting it differently, the oneness of environment for all the tenants of a home continues and sometimes intensifies the strain in either sense of blood-oneness. This may sound playful to those who have never bethought themselves touching the enormous difficulties that arise in the home insofar as some parents, having inflicted a certain heredity upon their offspring, are free to burden these filial victims with an environment escape from which might alone enable them to neutralize or palliate the evil of their heritage. I have in an earlier passage asked the query whether filial revolt is not the unconscious protest of children against the authors or transmitters of hereditary defect or taint.
Let me name two types or kinds of what are held to be conflicts between parents and children, which are not conflicts in any real sense of the term; first, intellectual differences and, second, the inevitable but impersonal antagonism of the two viewpoints or attitudes which front each other inthe persons of parent and child. As for purely intellectual differences, it is well to have in mind the world's current and suggestive use of the term "difference of opinion"—Carlyle saying of his talk with Sterling: "Except in opinion not disagreeing"—as if that in itself were quite naturally the precursor of strife and conflict. If difference of opinion oft deepen into conflict, is it not because in the home as in the world without we have not mastered the high art of patiently hearing another opinion? Graham Wallas[G]would urge: "A code of manners which combined tolerance and teachability in receiving the ideas of others, with frankness and, if necessary courageous persistence in introducing one's own ideas.... Whether we desire that our educational system should be based on and should itself create a general idea of our nation as consisting of identical human beings or of indifferent human beings" is the problem with which Wallas[H]faces us.
In the world without men may flee from oneanother but the walls of the home are more narrow. And within the home-walls, for reasons to be set forth, the merest differences of opinion, however honestly conceived and earnestly held, may be viewed as pride of ancient opinion on the one hand and forwardness of youthful heresy on the other. Parents are no more to be regarded as intolerably tyrannical because of persistence in definite opinions than children are to be viewed as totally depraved or curelessly dogmatic because of unrelinquishing adherence to certain viewpoints. I am naturally thinking of normal parents, if normal they be, who would rather be right than prevail, not of such parents as imagine that they must never yield even an opinion, nor yet of children surly and snarling who do not know the difference between vulgar self-insistence and high self-reverence. For the father a special problem arises out of the truth that the mother presides over the home as far as children are concerned and as long as they remain children, and he steps in to "rule" ordinarily after having failed through non-contacts to have established a relationship with children. This is the more regrettablebecause often it becomes almost the most important business of a father, through studied or feigned neglect, to neutralize the over-zealous attention of a mother, such attention as makes straight for over-conventionalization.
To regard differences of opinion as no more than differences of opinion will always be impossible to parents and children alike until these have learned how to lift these things to and keep them on an impersonal level. And of one further truth, previously hinted at, parents and children must become mindful,—that what, viewed superficially and personally, is their clashing, is nothing more than the wisdoms of the past meeting with the hopes of the future—past and future embodied in declining parent and nascent child.
Because of their fuller years and the circumstance of protective parenthood, parents are conservators, maintainers, perpetuators. Because of their uninstructed years and freedom from responsibility, children often become radical, uprooters and destroyers at the imperious behest of the future. These impersonal clashings of past and future can be kept on an impersonalbasis, provided parents can bring themselves to see that things are not right merely because they have been and that things are not wrong solely because they have not been before.
Perhaps at this point, though parents have experience to guide them and children only hopes to lead them, it is for parents to exercise the larger patience with hope's recruits, even though these find light and beauty alone in the rose tints of the future's dawn. Felix Adler has wisely said: "A main cause is the presumption in favor of the latest as the best, the newest as the truest.... The passion for the recent reacts on the respect or the want of respect that is shown to the older generation.... Now if one group of persons pulls in one direction and another group pulls in exactly the opposite direction, there is strain; and if the younger generation pulls with all its might in the direction of changing things, and if the older generation leans back as far as it can and stands for keeping things as they are, then there is bound to be a tremendous tension."
It may be true, as has lately been suggested by the same wise teacher, that the children of ourtime are in protest against parents, because these are the authors and agents of the sadly blundering world by them inherited. Is it not also true and by children to be had in mind that parents are fearful of the ruthless urge and, as it seems, relentless drive of the generation to be, which become articulate in the impatiences of youth? Dealing with the difference that arises out of the fact of parents facing pastward and children futureward, Professor Perry declares[I]: "The domestic adult is in a sort of backwash. He is looking toward the past, while the children are thinking the thoughts and speaking the language of tomorrow. They are in closer touch with reality, and cannot fail, however indulgent, to feel that their parents are antiquated.... The children's end of the family is its budding, forward-looking end: the adult's end is, at best, its root. There is a profound law of life by which buds and roots grow in opposite direction."
It were well for parents and in children to remember that past and future meet in the contacts of their common present, and that these conflict-provokingcontacts are due neither to parental waywardness nor to filial wilfulness. These are not unlike the seething waters of Hell Gate, the tidal waters of river and sound, meeting and clashing, and out of their meeting growing the eddies and whirlpools which have suggested the name Hell Gate bears. Through these whirling waters there runs a channel of safety, the security of the passerby depending upon the unresting vigilance of the navigator. The whirl of the waters is not less wild because the meeting is the meeting of two related bodies, two arms of the self-same sea.
If it be true, as true it is, that many of the so-called wars are not wars at all, there are on the other hand conflicts arising between parents and children which cannot be averted, conflicts the consequences of which must be frankly faced. To one of such conflicts we have already alluded,—that which grows out of impatience with what Emerson calls "otherness." But this, while not grave in origin, may and ofttimes does develop into decisive and divisive difference. "Difference of opinion" need not mar the peace of the parental-filial relation, unless parents or children or both are bent upon achieving sameness, even identity of opinion and judgment. It is here that parents and children require to be shown that sameness is not oneness, that, as has often been urged, uniformity is a shoddy substitute for unity, and that it is the cheapest of personal chauvinismsto insist upon undeviating likeness of opinion among the members of one's household. For, when this end is reached, intellectual impoverishment and sterility, bad enough in themselves in the absence of mental stimulus and enrichment, are sure to breed dissension.
An explicable but none the less inexcusable passion on the part of parents or children for sameness—a passion bred of intolerance and unwillingness to suffer one's judgment to be searched—is fatally provocative of conflict and clashing. Let parents seek to bring their judgments to children but any attempt at intellectual coercion is a species of enslavement. It may be good to persuade another of the validity of one's judgments, but such persuasion on the part of parents should be most reluctant lest children feel compelled to adopt untested parental opinion, and the docility of filial agreement finally result in intellectual dishonesty or aridity. Than this nothing could be more ungenerous, utilizing the intimacies of the home and the parental vantage-ground in the interest of enforcement of one's own viewpoints. If I had a son, who, every time he opened hismouth, should say, "Father, you are right," "Quite so, pater," "Daddy, I am with you," I should be tempted to despise him. I would have my son stand on his feet, not mine, nor any chance teacher's or boy comrade's, or favorite author's, but his own, and see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears, nerving me with occasional dissent rather than unnerving me with ceaseless assent.
Children are equally unjustified in attempting to compel parental adoption of filial views, but for many reasons it is much easier for parents to withstand filial coercion than the reverse, and up to this time the latter coercion has been rather rarer than the former. "The idea of the unity of two lives for the sake of achieving through their unsunderable union the unity of the children's lives with their own," citing the fine word of Felix Adler, is a very different thing, however, from lowering the high standards of voluntary unity to the level of compulsory uniformity.
Another cause of clashing may be briefly dealt with, for it is not really clashing that it evokes. They alone can clash who are near to one another,and I am thinking of an unbridgeable remoteness that widens ever more once it obtains between parents and children. Not clash but chasm, when parents and children find not so much that their ideals are so pitted against one another as to occlude the hope of harmonious adjustment, as that in the absence of ideals on one side or the other there has come about an unbridgeable gap. Nothing quite so tragic in the home as the two emptinesses or aridities side by side, with all the poor, mean, morally sordid consequences that are bound to ensue! And the tragedy of inward separation or alienation is heightened rather than lessened by the circumstance that the bond of physical contact persists for the most part unchanged.
Really serious clashing often grows out of the question of callings and the filial choice thereof. It is quite comprehensible that parents should find it difficult not to intervene when children, without giving proper and adequate thought, are about to choose a calling unfitting in itself or one to which they are unadapted. But here we deal with a variant of the insistence that parental experienceshall avert filial mischance or hurt. And here I must again insist that children have just the same right to make mistakes that we have exercised. They may not make quite as many as we made. It does not seem possible that they could. But, in any event, they have the right to make for that wisdom which comes of living amid toil and weariness and agony and all the never wholly hopeless blundering of life.
Upon parents may lie the duty to offer guidance, but compulsion is always unavailing and when availing leaves embitterment behind. It is woeful to watch a child mar its life but forcible intervention rarely serves to avert the calamity. One is tempted to counsel parents to consider thrice before they urge a particular calling upon a child. I have seen some young and promising lives wrecked by parental insistence that one or another calling be adopted. That a father is in a calling or occupation is a quite insufficient reason for a son being constrained to make it his own. A man or woman in the last analysis has the right of choice in the matter of calling, and parents have no more right to choose a callingthan to choose a wife or husband for a son or daughter.
A most fertile cause of conflict is at hand in the normal determination of parents to transmit the faith of the fathers to the children. The conflict is often embittered after the fashion of religious controversy, when parents are inflexibly loyal to their faith, passionately keen to share their precious heritage with the children, while children grow increasingly resolved to think their own and not their fathers' thoughts after God. It is easier to commend than to practice the art of patience with the heretical child, and yet our age is mastering that art,—the cynic would aver because of wide-spread indifference. Surely there can be no sorrier coercion than that which insists upon filial acquiescence in the religious dogmas held by parents, not less sorry because the parents may be merely renewing the coercive traditions of their own youth.
It is a hurt alike to children and to truth, to say nothing of the institutions of religion, to command faith the essence and beauty of which lies in its voluntariness. But if parents are not freeto coerce the minds of their children touching articles of faith, it is for children to remember what was said of Emerson,—that "he was an iconoclast without a hammer, removing our idols so gently it seemed like an act of worship." The dissenter need not be a vandal and the filial dissenter ought to be farthest from the vandal in manner touching the religious beliefs of parents. I would not carry the reverent manner to the point of outward conformity, but it may go far without doing hurt to the soul of a child, provided the spiritual reservations are kept clear.
The conflict of today is oftenest one between parental orthodoxy and filial liberalism or heresy. My own experience has led to the conviction that the clashing does not ordinarily arise between two varying faiths but rather between faith on the one hand and unfaith or unconcern with faith on the other. As for the Jewish home, the problem is complicated by reason of the truth, somehow ignored by Jew and non-Jew, that the religious conversion of a Jew usually leads to racial desertion as far as such a thing can be save in intent. In the Jewish home, racial loyalty and religious assent are so inextricably interwoven,—with ethical integrity in many cases in the balance,—that it is not to be wondered at that conflict oft obtains when the loyalty of the elders is met by the dissidence of the younger and such dissidenceis usually the first step on the way that leads to a break with the Jewish past.
And the battle, generally speaking, is not waged by parents on behalf of the child's soul nor yet in the interest of imperilled Israel, but in the dread of the hurt that is sure to be visited upon the guilt of disloyalty to a heritage cherished and safeguarded through centuries of glorious scorn of consequences. I should be grieved if a child were to say to me: "I cannot repeat the ancient Shema Yisrael, the watchword of the Jew: I find it necessary to reject the foundations of the Jewish faith." My heart, I say, would be sad, but I would not dream of attempting to coerce the mind of a child. I would look with horror and with heartbreak upon the act of a child, who under one pretext or another took itself out of the Jewish bond and away from Jewish life. If, I repeat, a child of mine were to say "I can have nothing to do with Israel," I would sorrow over that child as lost because I should know that its repudiation of the household of Israel was rooted in selfishness colored by self-protective baseness. But, let me again make clear, if achild should say "I cannot truly affirm God or His unity," I could not decently object,however harassed and unhappy I might feel. I could not tolerate the vileness of racial cowardice and desertion in a child, but I would have no right to break with it because of religious dissent.
One of the conflicts irrepressible arises when there comes to be a deep gulf fixed between the standards of parents and children, so deep as to make harmonious living impossible. Though it seem by way of excuse for children, it must be admitted that parental guidance is ofttimes woefully lacking, when suddenly falls some edict or interdict arbitrarily and unexpectedly imposed for which there has been no preparation whatsoever. It may be torturing for parents to face the facts, but they have no right to refuse to reap what they have sown, to accept the wholly unavoidable consequences of the training of their children. Parents who ask nothing of children for the first twenty years may not suddenly turn about and ask everything. You cannot until your child is twenty give all and after twenty forgive nothing. Parents may not be idiotically doting for twentyyears and then suddenly become austerely exacting. I have seen parents, who accept a young son's indolence, luxuriousness and dissipation of mind and body as quite the correct thing for youth, later yield to regret over the mental enervation and moral flabbiness of these sons.
A mother came to me not very long ago in tears over her son who had married a poor wanton creature. What I could no more than vaguely hint to the mother was that she had in some part prepared her son for the moral catastrophe by attiring herself after the manner of a woman of the streets. The household that exposes a son to the necessity of living daily by the side of poor imitations of the street-woman will find his ideals of womanhood sadly undermined in the end. The mother who does not offer a son a glimpse of something of dignity and fineness in her own life, alike in matter and manner, may expect little of her son. Standards at best must be cultivated and illustrated through the years of permeable childhood and cannot be improvised and insisted upon whenever in parental judgment it may become necessary.
There is little to choose between the tragedy of parental rejection of children's standards and filial abhorrence of the standards of parents. And both types of tragedy occur from time to time. Sometimes conflict is well, not conflict in the sense of ceaseless clashing but as frank and undisguised acceptance of the fact of irreconcilably discrepant standards. Better some wars than some peace! There are times when parents and children should conflict with one another, when approval is invited or tolerance expected of the intolerable and abhorrent, whether in the case of an unworthy daughter or a viciously dissolute son. I make the proviso that such conflict, decisive and final, can be as far as parents are concerned without the abandonment of love for the erring daughter or wayward son.
Severer, if anything, the conflict becomes when it is children who are bidden to endure and embrace what they conceive to be the lower standards of parents. The clashing may not be less serious because inward and voiceless rather than outward and vocal. If parents feel free to reprove children, it behooves them to have in mindthat children are and of right ought to be free to disapprove of parents, though the conventions seem to forbid children to utter such disapproval. Outward assent may cover up the most violent disapproval, and parenthood should hardly be offered up in mitigation or extenuation any more than the status of orphanhood should shield the parricide or matricide. And it cannot be made too clear, children have the right to reject for themselves the lower standards of parents.
Before me has come from time to time the question whether it is the business of a daughter to yield obedience to a mother who would inflict low and degrading standards upon her child. Or the question is put thus: what would you say to a son, who refuses to enter into and have part in the business of his father which he believes to be unethical, though the father and the rest of the world view it as wholly normal and legitimate? I may not find it in me to urge a child not to obey a parent, neither would I bid a son or daughter waive the scruples of conscience in order to please a parent. Times and occasions there are, I believe, when a child is justified in saying to parentsin the terms of finest gentleness and courtesy—the filialfortiter in remust above all else besuaviter in modo—it is not you whom I disobey, because I must obey a law higher than that which parents can impose upon me. I must obey the highest moral law of my own being.
But this decision is always a grave one and must be arrived at in the spirit of earnestness and humility, never in the mood of defiance. Whether or not this entail the necessity of physical separation is less important than that it be clearly understood that there is a higher law even than parental mandate or filial whim, that parents and child alike do well to understand. Parents dare not fail to act upon the truth that, if intellectual coercion be bad, the unuttered and unexercised compulsions toward a lower moral standard are infinitely worse. A child may not forget that, when parental dictate is repudiated in favor of a higher law, it must in truth be a higher law which exacts obedience. And even peace must be sacrificed when the higher law summons.
The parental-filial relation is almost the only institution of society that has not consciously come under the sway of the democratic regime or rather influences. Within a century, the world has passed from the imperial to the monarchical and from the monarchical to the democratic order—save in two rather important fields of life, industry and the home. In these two realms the transformation to the democratic modus remains to be effected,—I mean of course the conscious, however reluctant, acceptance thereof. True it is that many children and fewer parents have made and will continue to make it for themselves, but the process is one which the concerted thought and co-operative action of parents and children can far better bring to consummation. The difficulty of the transformation is increased almostindefinitely by the microscopic character of the family unit. It is not easy to keep the open processes of the State up to the standards of democracy,—how much more difficult the covert content of the inaccessible home!
In all that parents do with respect to the home, assuming their acceptance of the democratic order and its requirements, they may not forget that the home, like every educational agency of our time, must "train the man and the citizen." Milton's insistence is not less binding today than it was when first uttered nearly three centuries ago. A man cannot be half slave and half free. He cannot be fettered by an autocratic regime within the home and at the same time be a free and effective partner in the working out of the processes of democracy. Democracy and discipline are never contradictory and the discipline of democracy can alone be self-discipline. Professor Patten in his volume, "Product and Climax,"[J]hints at a real difficulty: "We want our children to retain the plasticity of youth, and yet we believe in a disciplinary education and loveto put them at difficult tasks, having no end but rigidity of action and a narrower viewpoint. At the same breath we ask for heroes and demand more democracy."
What is really involved when the matter is reduced to its simplest terms, is seen to be a new conception of the home. For many centuries, it has been a world or realm wherein parents filled a number of roles or parts,—chief among these regents on thrones, dispensers of bounty, teachers of the infant mind. Any survey of the home today that surveys more than surface things must take into account one other figure,—or set of figures,—the figure of a child. And the child not as the subject of the parental regent, however wise, nor yet as the unquestioning pupil of the parental tutor, however infallible! The home can no longer remain, amid the crescent sway of the democratic ideal, a kingdom with one or two or even more thrones, nor yet a debating society. Shall we say parliament, seeing that in Parliament and Congress it is reputed to be the habit of men to plead for truth rather than for victory?
The home must become a school wherein parentsand children alike sit as eager learners and humble teachers, a school for parents in the latter days in the arts of renunciation and for children in the fine arts of outward courtesy and inward chivalry. In such a classroom the child will learn to think non-filially for itself, though it will not cease to feel filially. Under such auspices, the child will be neither a manageable nor an unmanageable thing but a person bent upon self-direction and self-determination through the arts of self-discipline. In the interest of that self-discipline which parental example can do most to foster, let it be remembered by parents that no rule is as effective with children as self-mastery, that the only convincing and irrefutable authority is inner authoritativeness. Spencer has laid down the ideal for the home: "to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others." If parents are so unwise as to postpone and deny the right of children to live their lives until after their parents are dead, it may be that these will die too late for their own comfort. Parents who rely upon parental authority, whatever that may mean, in dealing withchildren ought to be quietly chloroformed or peacefully deposited in the Museum of Natural History by the side of the almost equally antique Diplodoccus.
The teacherless classroom, the school which is without direction and without dogmaex cathedra, is a peculiarly fitting metaphor to invoke. It may serve to remind children that the newly achieved equivalence of the home is not to result in parental subjection or subordination, that the inviolable rights of personality are not exactly a filial monopoly,—crescent filial tyranny being little less intolerable than obsolescent parental despotism—that the passing of the years does not make it exactly easier to abandon or to forswear personality. It were little gain to substitute King Log of filial rule for King Stork of parental command. Filial domination, in other words, is not less odious because of its novelty. In a recent number ofThe Outlook, E. M. Place, writing on "Democracy in the Home," puts it well: "There are two kinds of despotism in the home that are alike and equally intolerable: One is parental and the other is filial."
Bernard Shaw[K]is quite unparadoxical and almost commonplace in his fear that there is a possibility of home life oppressing its inmates. The peril is not of revolt against the oppressions of home life by its inmates but of unrevolting submission which were far worse on their part. From such oppressions there is but one escape, the deliberate introduction of a democratic regime. "It is admitted that a democracy develops and trains the individual while an autocracy dwarfs and represses the possibilities within. The parent who is autocratic, who says do this and do that because I say so without appealing to the reason and judgment of the child, can never create the real home, the one in which good citizens are made. The democratic home where the individual welfare and the general welfare are given due consideration, where conduct is the result of the appeal to reason, is as much the right of the child as a voice in his own government is the right of an adult."
And one thing more! Some marriages are intolerable and the only way of peace, not of cowardiceor of evasion, is the way out. Without at this time entering into the question whether the multiplicity of divorces is imperilling the social order, I make bold to say that it ought not be considered an enormity on the part of children nor an indictment of parents, if parents and adult children conclude to liveapart, unharassed and untortured by the conditions of propinquity. Fewer children would enter into obviously fatal marriages if marriage were not regarded as the only decent and respectable way out of the home for a daughter. Who does not know of young people marrying in order to escape from the home? I do not mean to imply that all young people who desire to escape from the home are the victims of domestic repression and parental tyranny, but I have often deemed it lamentable that, for some young people as I have known them, marriage offered the only excuse or pretext for taking oneself out of the home. Such self-exile from home by the avenue of marriage often leads to tragedy graver than any from which it was sought to take refuge. But a democratic regime in the home must include the possibilityof honorable and peaceable withdrawal therefrom.
It should be said by way of parenthesis that marriage is not always a secure refuge from the undemocratically ordered home. For parental intervention in the life of married children is not unimaginable. Under my observation there came some months ago the story of parents, who quite forcibly withdrew the person of their daughter and her infant child from her and her husband's home because the latter was unwilling or unable to expend a grotesquely large sum for its maintenance. This is merely an exaggerated example of the insistence on the part of parents on the unlessened exercise of that power of control over children, which is the very negation of democracy.
Reverence thy son and thy daughter lest thy days seem too long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. One of the elements making for conflict between parent and child is the desire of parents who ask for love, taking respect for granted, and the insistence of children, taking love for granted, that parental respect be yielded them. There are many causes that make mutual respect in any real sense difficult between parent and child, parents asking love for themselves as parents, children seeking respect for themselves as persons. After dealing for two decades or nearly that with a child in the terms of love, parents do not find it easy to treat a child with the reverence that is offered to one deemed a complete, rational, unchildlike person.
An eminent theologian once declared that it was easy enough to love one's neighbors but hardto like them. So might many parents in truth say that it is easy, yea, inevitable, to love their children but very difficult to yield them the reverence of which upon reflection they are found to be deserving. And it happens that parents can and do give their children all but the one thing which they insist upon having from parents, namely, a decent respect. Such respect is in truth impossible as long as parents always think of themselves as parents and of children as children. The temptation presses to urge parents sometimes to forget that they are parents, and to suggest to children sometimes to remember that they are children—in any event, semi-occasionally to recall that to parents children are ever and quite explicably children.
Parents cannot begin too soon to treat children with respect. One of the most disrespectful as well as stupid things that can be done in relation to a child is to treat it like a monkey trained for exhibition purposes in order to "entertain" some resident aunt or visiting uncle. The worst way to prepare a child for self-respect is to exhibit him to ostensibly admiring relatives as if he or shewere a rare specimen in a zoölogical garden. Too many of us are Hagenbacks to our children, not so much for the sake of otherwise unoccupied relatives or especially doting grandparents as for the sake of flattering our own cheap and imbecile pride.
The relation of mutual respect cannot obtain between parent and child as long as the instinct of parental proprietorship is dominant, as long as there is a failure to recognize that a child's individuality must be reckoned with. But there must be the underlying assumption that a child's judgment may be entitled to respect, in other words, is not inherently contemptible. Once assumed that a child may cease to be a child and become a person able to think, decide, choose, act for itself, there is no insuperable difficulty in determining when a child's judgment is entitled to respect, provided of course by way of preliminary that parents are ready to put away the pet superstition of parental infallibility and impeccability. Nothing so calculated to win a child's reverence as parental admission of fallibility generally and of some error of thought and speech in particular!
One rarely hears or learns of a child who feels that parents fail to love it but one comes upon children not a few, normal beings rather than those afflicted with the persecution complex, who deeply lament the fact that parents do not treat them with the reverence owing from normal, wholesome beings to one another. It is this that more than anything else makes some children impatient of the very name, children, the term with its ceaseless implication of relative existence becoming odious to them. No one will maintain that it is easy to achieve relations of reciprocal reverence between parent and child, viewing the fact that family intimacies while tending to foster affection do not make for the strengthening of respect. For respect is most frequently evoked by the unknown and unfamiliar even as the familiar and the known, because it is known, touches the springs of affection. Parental reverence may not be unachievable, but it involves the acceptance of a child as a self-existent being, intellectually, morally, spiritually.
One of the results of the liberating processes of our age is the deeping consciousness of childrenthat they have the unchallengeable right to live their own lives, under freedom to develop their own personalities. Revolting against the superimposition of parental personality, the more deadening because childhood is imitative, they have begun to hearken to Emerson's counsel to insist upon themselves. Too often they carry their fidelity to this monition to the illegitimate length of insistence upon idiosyncracy rather than of emphasis upon personality. To cherish and defend every fleeting opinion as sacred and unamendable dogma is not insistence upon self but wilful pride of opinion. And yet even such self-insistence is better than such self-surrender as dwarfs children and by so much belittles parents.
It may seem superfluous to second the claim of children to self-determination, but in truth parents have so long and so crushingly overwhelmed their once-defenceless children with theforce majeureof their own personality that even a parent may welcome the long-deferred revolt making for self-determination. The child has rightfully resolved not to be a perfect replica,—usually a duplicate of manifold imperfections,—butto be itself with all its own imperfections on its head. This is the answer to the question whether children ought ever suffer their minds to be coerced. Intellectual compulsion and spiritual coercion are always inexcusable, though in the interest of that much-abused term, the higher morality, children may resort to the accommodation of conformity without sacrifice of the substance of individuality and its basic self-respect.
And when I venture to hint at the concession of outward conformity without of course doing violence to the scruples of conscience, the concession that will bid children to tread the pathway of conformity in externals, I call to mind and to witness a quarter-century's experience in the ministry. In the course of it, it has fallen to my lot to be consulted by numerous children. In only one case has a child said to me, I regret my obedience to my parents' will. But times without number have children said to me, How I rejoice, though sometimes it seemed hard, that I followed the counsel of my mother, that I yielded to my father's will. But one may not bid parents reverence their children and respect their sense offreedom without intimating to children, howsoever reluctantly, that even parents have some inalienable rights, and that children ought to accord some freedom to parents, even though these be likely to abuse it. Parents, too, must be regarded as free agents. Filial usurpation of parental freedom is not wholly unprecedented in these days of reappraisal of most values.
Parents and children alike will be helped to reverence one another as free agents when they learn that infringement upon the freedom of another is for the most part such an obtrusion of self into the life of another as grows out of the contentlessness of one's own life. No man or woman whose life is full and worth-while has enough of spare time and strength to find it possible to meddle in busy-bodying fashion with the life of others. Nagging, no matter by whom, is just domestic busy-bodying, growing out of the failure to respect the personality of another and out of the vacuity of one's own life. Nagging, however ceaseless, is not correction. Conflict must not be confounded with scolding any more than love and petting are the same thing. Scolding,nagging, ceaseless fault-finding, these are not conflicts nor even the symptoms thereof. These are usually nothing more than signs of inner conflict and unrest finding petty and unavailing, because external, outlets. No home irrespective of circumstance can be free from conflict in which there is a failure to understand that every member of the household is a self-regarding and inviolate personality and that the physical contacts of the family life are no excuse for the ceaseless invasion of personality.
I have not said economically, though it is not always easy for parents to remember that economic dependence in no wise involves intellectual, moral, spiritual dependence. The difficulty, as has already been pointed out, is greatly enhanced by reason of the fact that parents and children are too apt to label and classify and pigeon-hole one another, parents assumed to be visionless maintainers and conservators of the status quo and children regarded as vandal disturbers of the best possible of worlds.
To confound voluntary reverence with the obligations of gratitude is indeed the woefullest ofblunders. I have sometimes thought that the parental-filial relationship is not infrequently strained because it rests upon bounty or indebtedness, acknowledged or unacknowledged. There is a strain which ofttimes proves too hard to be borne between benefactor and beneficiary. This strain may be eased if parents will but avoid thinking of themselves as benefactors and children will but remember that the fact of adolescence or post-adolescence does not cancel all the relationships and conditions of earlier life. I cannot conceive of deeper unwisdom than to rest one's case with children in the matter of unyielded obedience or ungranted reverence or aught else upon the basis of gratitude. It is as futile as it is vicious to dream of exacting gratitude, seeing that gratitude is not a debt to be paid, least of all a toll to be levied. Is there really much to choose between the parent plaintively appealing for filial gratitude and the termagant wife insistently clamoring for love.
If parents bent upon having gratitude and appreciation would but remember that during the years in which parents do most for their children the latter are blissfully unconscious, it would helpthem over the rough places of seeming inappreciation and ingratitude. The first ten years of a child's life are those of most constant and tender service on the part of parents, the period of deepest anxieties and uttermost sacrifices. And yet the fact of infancy and early childhood precludes the possibility of remembrance, understanding, appreciation. The conscious relation of parent and child does not really begin much before the tenth year.
A wise teacher of the Northwest once said: "Children are either too young or too old to be physically punished." Something of the same kind might be said with respect to appeals for gratitude. Either these are unnecessary or else they are unavailing. In any event, the relation between parent and child must never be brought down to the level of one of bestowal and acceptance of bounty and the obligations thereby entailed. The highest magnanimity is needed on the part of parents, so deep and uncancellable is the debt of children,—by parents to be obliterated from memory, by children to be translated into the things of life.
The undemocratic character of the home reveals itself in a way that is familiar enough,—the way of parental possession. Nothing could be more difficult for parents to abandon than the sense of ownership, tenderly conceived and graciously fostered. And yet, hard as the lesson may be, it must be learned by parents that the spirit of proprietorship cannot coexist with the democratic temper in the home.
I sometimes regret that children are not born full-grown, that they do not subsequently develop or devolve into babies, so that the earliest aspect of a child, diminutive, helpless, should not, as it does, evoke the sense of absolute and exclusive ownership. If children would only at six months or a year begin to argue, vigorously to combat their parents' views, the ordinary transition from bland acquiescence to over-facile dissent would besomewhat less harsh and startling. The thing, which perhaps does most to intensify the shock and pain incidental to divergence of opinion, is that the first eight or ten years of childhood give no intimation or little more than intimation of the possibility of conflict in later years. The unresisting acquiescence of children in never-ending bestowal of parental bounty offers no hint of the possibility of future strife. The legal plea of surprise might almost be offered up by parents, who find, as one of them has expressed it, that, when children are young, they "stay put," can be found whenever sought. Later they neither stay nor are put, but move tangentially and, it would seem by preference, into orbits of their own,—and not always heavenly orbits.
Some parents never wean themselves nor even seek to do so from the sense of proprietorship, which is sure to be rudely disturbed unless parents are wise to yield it up. No grown, reasoning, self-respecting person wishes to be or to be dealt with as a being in fief to another. Ofttimes itproves exceedingly hard for fond parents to relinquish the sense of ownership, for the latter isdeeply satisfying and even flattering to the owner. In very truth, parents must come to understand that children are not born to them as possessions. The parental part does not confer ownership rights. Children should not be regarded and cherished as a life-long possession nor even for a time. They are entrusted by the processes of birth and the decree of fate to parents, to be cared for during the days of dependence, to be nurtured and developed till maturity, the latter to mark the ending of the period of conscious parental responsibility.
As long as children have not reached adolescence and the consciousness thereof, they may endure nor even note the mood of parental possession. But once complete self-consciousness dawns, the sense of ownership becomes intolerable to any child that is more than a domestic automaton, and, if persisted in, makes any wholesomeness of relation between parent and child unthinkable. Many years ago, a sage friend tendered me some unforgettable counsel. I had, perhaps unwisely, commiserated with him upon the fact that his lovely children, sons and daughtersalike, were leaving the parental roof and beginning their lives anew in different and remote parts of the land. His answer rang prompt and decisive: "Children were not given to us to keep. They are placed with us for a time in trusteeship and now that they are old enough to leave us and to stand upon their own feet, it is well for them to make their own homes and become the builders of their own lives." This sage and his like-minded wife had achieved the art of dispossessing themselves of their children, or rather they had never suffered themselves to tread the pathway of possession.
To a rational adult the sense of possession by another is irksome, save in the case of youthful lovers whose irrationality may for a time take the form of pleasure in the fact of possession by another. But when sanity enters into the joy of the love-relation, then the sense of ecstasy in being possessed vanishes and with its passing comes a renewal of self-possession which alone is complete sanity. Self-possession brooks no invasion or possession of personality by another. The matter of possession becomes gravely disturbingbecause the parental tendency in the direction of proprietorship becomes keenest at a time when children are least disposed to be possessed in any way. As children near adulthood, they desire to be autonomous persons rather than things or possessions. Then the conflict comes, and, though not consciously, is fought for and against possession.
Briefly, adolescence brings with it an insistence upon the end of the relative and the beginning of absolute, that is unrelated, existence. Somehow and for the most part unhappily, the child's insistence upon absolute self-possession and self-existence comes at a time,—it may be evocative rather than synchronous—when parents most desire or feel the need to be parents. This craving for a maximum of parenthood, not in the interest of filial possession, is evoked by the normal, adolescent child, as it begins to find its main interests and absorptions outside of the home, with the consequent loosening of what seemed to be irrefragably close and intimate ties. And the parental sense of proprietary supervision is not lessened by the circumstance that the child now faces thoseproblems the rightful solution of which means so much to its future.
Thus does the conflict arise. Children, though they know it not or know it only in part, face the great tests and challenges of life, rejoicing that these are to be their experiences, their problems, their tests. Parents view these self-same challenges and are deeply concerned lest these prove too much for children and leave them broken and blighted upon life's way. It is really fairer to say that what is viewed as the parental instinct of possession is really nothing more than the eagerness of parents somehow to bestow upon children the unearned fruits of experience. It is the primary and inalienable right of children to blunder, to falter upon the altar-steps, and blundering is a teacher wiser though costlier than parents. Reckoning and rueing the price they have paid for the lessons of experience, parents, whose good-will is greater than their wisdom, insist upon the right to transmit to children through teaching these lessons of experience. But they fail to realize that certain things are unteachable and intransmissible.
Confounding the classroom with the school of life, it is assumed that certain truths are orally teachable. Children, building better than they know, insist that the wisdom of experience cannot be orally communicated, that it is not to be acquired through parental bestowal or teaching or insistence, but solely through personal effort, and, though at first they know it not, through hardship and suffering. Wisdom cannot be imparted to children by parents under an anaesthesia that averts pain and suffering. Hard is it for parents to accept the truth pointed out by Coleridge that experience is only a lamp in a vessel's stern, which throws a light on the waters we have passed through, none on those which lie before us.
The conflict then is between children who insist upon the privilege of acquiring the wisdom of life through personal experience which includes blundering and suffering, and parents whose sense of possession strengthens their native resolution to bring to loved children all the benefits and gains of life's experiences without permitting children to pay the price which life exacts. Andparents, in the unreasoning passion to ward off hurt and wound from the heads of children, forget that if the wisdom of experience were transmissible we should have moral stagnation and spiritual immobility in the midst of life.
But if parents may not expect to be able to transmit the body of their life-experience to children, neither should children assume that the multiplication table is an untested hypothesis because accepted by parents, or that elementary truths are wholly dubious because parental assent has been given thereto. If parents must learn that children cannot be expected to regard every thesis as valid solely because held by parents, children need hardly take it for granted, though it may of course be found to be true, that the parental viewpoint is uniformly erring and invalid.
If parents, who are tempted to yield to the instinct of proprietorship rather, as we have seen, than of domination, would but understand, as was lately suggested in a psychological analysis of Barrie's "Mary Rose," that there are women who mother the members of their circles so persistently that they impose a certain childishness onthem, the mother's influence often producing incompetence and timidity! To such parents, however, as will not admit the fact of possession, it remains to be pointed out that parents do not live forever and are usually survived by their children. The "owned" child is not unlikely with the years to become and to remain a poor, miserable dependent intellectually and spiritually, once its parents are gone.
View another case, the marriage of the "owned" child, even when it does not accept any marriage that offers as a mode of release from parental bondage. I have had frequent occasion to note that the "owned" child, freed from parental suppression, is often revenged upon parental tyranny by an era of luxurious despotism, or, what is worse, renews the reign of ownership and dependence by becoming the "owned" wife or undisowned husband, a sorry, beggarly serf, whose lifelong dependence in the worst sense is largely the sequel to parental proprietorship or overlordship. The parental tyranny that is well-meant and gentle yields place in marriage to a tyranny that is most untender and may even bebrutal, its victim, male or female, habituated by parental usage to the art of unrevolting submission, or, when not thus habituated, goaded to a vindictive and compensatory sense of mastery.
To urge parents to relinquish the sense of possession, to prepare them for the day when they shall find it inevitable to "give up," is to do them a real service. Let them prepare with something of fortitude for the day that comes to many parents, which is to establish and confirm the fact of parental dispensableness. The fortitude may have to be Spartan in character. It is our fate, and parents, who are practised in the art of long-suffering endurance, must learn to bear this last test of strength with undimmable courage and even to rejoice therein.
There is a further problem over and beyond all those heretofore set forth,—the problem, which might be described under the term, the complication of relatives, the problem, shall we call it, of help or hindrance from family members, who, asked or unasked and usually unasked, undertake to act as vice-parents prior to the resignation or decease of parents. The relationship is not ordinarily one of reciprocity, for, however great be the help or hurt that can be done to a child by an intervening kinsman or kinswoman, the relation of the child to him or her does not as a rule root very deep in the life of the younger person.
One thing parents may ask, though usually they do not: one thing children ought to ask, though usually they would not; namely, that when relatives touch the life of parent and child,—asthey not infrequently do,—they shall exert their influence on behalf of understanding between parent and child. I have seen much done to wreck the home by those who forget that the parental-filial relation is a sanctuary not lightly to be trespassed upon even by those who physically dwell in close proximity thereto.
One of the commonest forms of pernicious intervention is the attempt to mitigate parental severity, to soften parental asperity, on the part of nice, soft, respectable kinsmen and kinswomen, who regard a child under twenty years or even under twenty-five in some cases as a little lap-dog to be caressed and fondled, but in no wise to be dealt with as a human to whom much may be given and from whom more must be asked. Parents' standards may seem, and even be, exigent, but the attempt to modify their rigor may not be made by those lacking in fundamental reverence for a child, and in conscious hope for its wise, noble, self-reliant maturity.
The kind uncle and the indulgent aunt have no right under heaven to wreak their unreasoning tenderness upon niece or nephew in such fashionas to make any and every standard seem cruelly exigent to the child. Parents are not uniformly, though oft approximately, infallible, and family members have the right and duty to take counsel with, which always means to give counsel, to parents but not in the presence of children. I have seen children moved to distrust of parental mandate and judgment even when these were wise and just by reason of the malsuggestion oozing forth from relatives, the zeal of whose intervention is normally in inverse proportion to the measure of their wisdom. Childish rebellion against parental guidance, however enlightened, oft dates from the time of some avuncular remonstrance against or antique impatience with parents "who do not understand the dear child." But there is another and a better way, and kinsfolk can frequently find it within the range of their power to supplement parental teaching in ways that shall be profitable alike to child and parent.
The nearest, the most constant impact upon the child is that of the mother, and less often of the father. The mountain summit to which greatness ascends in the sight of multitudes is often nothingmore than some height, reached in loneliness and out of the sight of the world by a brave, mother-soul, wrestling through unseen and unaided struggle for that, which shall later be disclosed to the world as the immortal achievement of a child and so acclaimed by the plaudits of the world. One remembers, for example, that the mother of William Lloyd Garrison wrote of her colored nurse during her illness: "A slave in the sight of man, but a freeborn soul in the sight of God." Thus is she revealed as the mother of the Abolition struggle.
Professor Brumbaugh,[L]who ceased for a time to be a good teacher in order to be an indifferent Governor of his Commonwealth, tells the story of Pestalozzi taken by his grandfather to the homes of the poor, the child saying: "When I am a man, I mean to take the side of the poor." "He lived like a beggar that he might teach beggars to live like men." Truly one must find the mother behind or rather before the man. The mother of Emerson is thus described by his son[M]:"To a woman of her stamp, provision for her sons meant far more than mere food, raiment and shelter. Their souls first, their minds next, their bodies last; this was the order in which their claims presented themselves to the brave mother's mind. Lastly in those days the body had to look after itself very much; more reverently they put it, the Lord will provide." After his first week of Harvard life, Mrs. Emerson wrote to her son[N]: "What most excites my solicitude is your moral improvement and your progress in virtue. Let your whole life reflect honor on the name you bear." Curious from the viewpoint of modern practice that nothing was said about the weekly or fortnightly hamper of goodies or the cushions shortly to follow,—to say nothing of the ceaselessly entreated remittance!
The influence of a father upon his son comes to light as one reads Dr. Emerson's life of his father: "In view of the son's shrinking from all attempts to wall in the living truth with forms, his father's early wish and hope, while still in Harvard, of moving to Washington and there foundinga church without written expression of faith or covenant, is worthy of note." One comes to see that a man is what he is because of the love he bears his mother, as one reads of Commodore Perkins[O]that on the eve of the Battle of Mobile Bay he wrote to her: "I know that I shall not disgrace myself no matter how hot the fighting may be, for I shall think of you all the time." Thomas Wentworth Higginson[P]tells that his own strongest impulse in the direction of anti-slavery reform came from his mother. Being once driven from place to place by an intelligent negro driver, my mother said to him that she thought him very well situated after all; on which he turned and looked at her, simply saying: "Ah, Missus, free breath is good." Respecting his arrest later in connection with John Brown and Harper's Ferry, Higginson writes[Q]: "Fortunately it did not disturb my courageous mother, who wrote: 'I assure you it does not trouble me, though I dare say that some of my friends are commiserating me for having a son riotously and routously engaged.'"
Again and again, we look back and find that the great deed or noble utterance of some historic figure is merely the echo of an earlier word or deed of a forbear. We have seen it in the influences that shaped or in any event steered Garrison, Mazzini, Pestalozzi. Former President Tucker[R]of Dartmouth College declares that the memorable speech of the Defender of the Constitution is to be explained not by his own greatness. His father had made it before him.... This speech was in his blood. The fact is that the great address of the Defender of the Constitution was made by his father fifty years earlier when Colonel Webster moved New Hampshire to enter the Union." The grandfather of Theodore Parker was the minister of Concord at the time of the Concord fight and on the Sunday previous he had preached on the text: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."
That a kinsman or kinswoman may equal, even surpass, a parent in influence wide and deep upon a child might be variously illustrated. No more familiar illustration obtains than that of MaryMoody, aunt of Emerson, of whom his son writes: "She gave high counsel. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated in their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in education could supply. Lift up your aims, always do what you are afraid to do, scorn trifles,—such were the maxims she gave her nephews and which they made their own.... Be generous and great and you will confer benefits on society, not receive them, through life. Emerson himself said of his aunt[S]: her power over the mind of her young friends was almost despotic, describing her influence upon himself as great as that of Greece or Rome.
It may in truth often be a sister who brings strength and heartening to a man. Ernest Renan writes to his sister Henriette[T]: "But that ideal does not exist in our workaday world, I fear. Life is a struggle, Life is hard and painful, yet let us not lose courage. If the road be steep, we have within us a great strength; we shall surmountour stumbling-block. It is enough if we possess our conscience in rectitude, if our aim be noble, our will firm and constant. Let happen what may, on that foundation we can build up our lives." Again he wrote to her: "My lonely, tired heart finds infinite sweetness in resting upon yours. I sometimes think that I could be quite happy in a simple, common life, which I should ennoble from within. Then I think of you and look higher." The tender inquisitress was not satisfied, declares the biographer of Renan,[U]until all was pure, exact, discreet and true. She said to her brother: Be thou perfect. Most of all she sought to cultivate in him the habit of veracity, a habit the seminary had not inculcated it appears. So great was the influence of Henriette that for years afterward not only did her brother act as she would bid him act, but, far rarer triumph of her love, he thought as she would have bid him think, in all seriousness, in all tenderness, with a remote and noble elevation, checking as they rose those impulses toward irony, frivolity, scepticism, which she had not loved.