Child Versus Parent Part 3

REVERENCE THY SON AND THY DAUGHTER

Reverence thy son and thy daughter lest thy days seem too long in the land which the Lord thy G.o.d 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 hard to 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 she were a rare specimen in a zoological 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 a.s.sumption that a child's judgment may be ent.i.tled to respect, in other words, is not inherently contemptible. Once a.s.sumed 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 ent.i.tled to respect, provided of course by way of preliminary that parents are ready to put away the pet superst.i.tion 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 children that 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 the _force majeure_ of 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,--but to 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 of freedom 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 circ.u.mstance 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 cla.s.sify and pigeon-hole one another, parents a.s.sumed 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 grat.i.tude is indeed the woefullest of blunders. 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 grat.i.tude. It is as futile as it is vicious to dream of exacting grat.i.tude, seeing that grat.i.tude 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 grat.i.tude and the termagant wife insistently clamoring for love.

If parents bent upon having grat.i.tude and appreciation would but remember that during the years in which parents do most for their children the latter are blissfully unconscious, it would help them over the rough places of seeming inappreciation and ingrat.i.tude. 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 grat.i.tude. 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.

CHAPTER XI

THE OBSESSION OF POSSESSION

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 be somewhat 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 it proves exceedingly hard for fond parents to relinquish the sense of ownership, for the latter is deeply 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 daughters alike, 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 pa.s.sing 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 disturbing because 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 circ.u.mstance that the child now faces those problems 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 cla.s.sroom with the school of life, it is a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed 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. And parents, in the unreasoning pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sume that the multiplication table is an untested hypothesis because accepted by parents, or that elementary truths are wholly dubious because parental a.s.sent 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 a.n.a.lysis of Barrie's "Mary Rose," that there are women who mother the members of their circles so persistently that they impose a certain childishness on them, 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 be brutal, 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 fort.i.tude for the day that comes to many parents, which is to establish and confirm the fact of parental dispensableness. The fort.i.tude 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.

CHAPTER XII

PARENTS AND VICE-PARENTS

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,--as they 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 trespa.s.sed 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, n.o.ble, 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 fashion as 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 mult.i.tudes is often nothing more 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 G.o.d." 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 founding a 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 a.s.sure 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.'"