PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY
The wayward boy is often the son of a wayward parent.
Waywardness results not so much from the effects of heredity as
from lack of training. Wrong training, lack of training, and bad
environment are the great, compelling influences toward delinquency,
which overshadow all other causes of juvenile waywardness; and for such
causes parents are directly and primarily responsible.
This is a severe indictment of parents, but not more severe than the
consequences of their neglect of duty warrant. Many parents act on
the presumption that their obligation is fulfilled by supplying the
child with food, clothing, shelter, and school, forgetting the equally
important duty of developing his moral and spiritual nature. Such
conditions are usually the result of indifference, a sin of omission,
and only rarely do they result from bad precept and example.
In the larger number of cases, the wayward parent is such because
of ignorance of the scope of his duty, or because of his delegation
of moral and religious training to the school or some other agency
not fully equipped for the task. It is seldom that a parent does not
earnestly desire high moral character in his offspring. He hopes
in a blind, inchoate way that his son will become a well-rounded
man--physically, mentally, morally, socially, spiritually. By what
means that hope is to fructify he does not know. He is groping in the
dark, hoping against hope that the miracle of evolution will result in
perfection, without the employment of the methods and agencies at his
command which will assist to that end.
The first step, then, in the training of the boy is the training of
the parent. And what applies to the father usually applies, with less
force, to the mother.
When we reclaim wayward parents, we shall reclaim wayward boys. The
first step toward reclamation is the awakening of their sense of
responsibility--the driving home of the consciousness of stewardship.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” has still stronger application to the
father and the mother of a son. Yours is the responsibility for
the child’s presence in the world; yours is the responsibility for
supplying the conventional comforts on which physical life depends;
but still more emphatically yours is the responsibility of furnishing
the guiding hand which will pilot the frail bark of youth through the
storm and stress of adolescence. During infancy he is anchored in the
harbor of home, surrounded by love and physical comfort; during early
boyhood his bark is drifting on the current toward the sea; while the
dawn of adolescence plunges him into an unknown and uncharted ocean,
without rudder or compass by which to avoid the sunken reefs of danger
and the rocks which wreck the development of character. The morally
obligatory duty of child-culture must be encouraged, revived, trained,
and put into operation.
Eugene ----, age 13, was reared by an indulgent father, after his
mother’s death. A stepmother entered the home when the lad was nine. He
was a robust boy, athletic and active, handsome, lovable, but mentally
lazy, backward in school, without continuity of purpose or action,
inclined to falsehood and evasion, willful, disobedient, extravagant
and spoiled. He remarked one day to a companion, in my hearing, “Dad’s
a stingy guy. He only gives me five dollars a week spending money.”
This boy’s problem was a serious one, but not hopeless by any means.
The delinquent parent was responsible for the delinquency of his son.
Engrossed in the cares of manifold business interests, he “had no time”
for the training of his boy. He failed to realize that making a son
is more important than making money. If he had given his business no
more thought and judgment than he gave his son, he would be a financial
bankrupt. As it is, the son probably will be a character bankrupt.
At the present time his moral liabilities exceed his assets--a poor
beginning for the business of building a human life. His affairs should
be in the hands of a receiver--a boy-expert who will rehabilitate the
boy--or, better still, who will arouse the parent to recognize his
duty and do it. The intelligent parent is the natural and best teacher
of his own child.
Up-to-date horticulturists and agriculturists avail themselves of
the sum total of scientific knowledge concerning their respective
professions. Unscientific, misdirected, and indifferent methods
produce failure; inferior fruits and grains of limited yield do
not pay. The importance of many things is measured by a financial
standard. When reduced to a monetary basis, production is of sufficient
importance to call forth the best research, skill, and thought of
the individual. Child-culture is more important than horticulture,
even though its benefits cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
The Department of Agriculture spends millions of dollars every year,
largely in the perfection of cattle and hogs. The improvement of the
breed of hogs is not more important than the improvement of the
breed of boys. Personally, I prefer the boy to the hog. He is just as
great a necessity in the human economy and, besides, he is much more
companionable. The best crop we raise is children. Why not improve
their breed? The vanity of the parent may answer that they already
are splendidly endowed by heredity with all the virtues of mind,
morals, and body possessed by their progenitors. But heredity is no
such miracle worker. If heredity has equipped the child with a perfect
physical machine it still remains necessary to teach him not only how
to run it, but how to keep it in good condition. The perfect body will
not, unaided, stay perfect, nor will it develop the strong mind and
character. All of these--and more--are required to make the perfect man.
“Better boys” should be our slogan. The accountability of the
parent for his sacred trust cannot be evaded. It is the one great,
upstanding, overshadowing duty concurrent with parenthood. The failure
to appreciate its importance is due to many causes. Among them may
be mentioned the complexity of our present-day civilization with its
incessant demands upon the time and strength of parents. In some
instances the stress and struggle incident to earning a living leave
little time for the development of the child. This is especially true
in those homes where squalid poverty abides. The husband, exhausted
by the grinding toil which he has exchanged for a scant wage, returns
home at night and finds a wife worn in mind and body by her task of
maintaining a home on less than is requisite for livable conditions.
Neither is fit to perform the larger duties of parenthood. Add to this,
sickness, accident, unemployment, intemperance, and child labor, and
the cup is full. The toll of toil is wretched childhood. The children
are neglected in everything except a bare physical existence. The son
of such a home naturally takes to the street where he pursues his
play, unguided and untaught. The result is a street gamin with all his
inherent potentialities for good submerged beneath the delinquency and
vice which are bred in the street. A continuous procession of such
children passes through our juvenile courts every day. Such pitiable
cases--and they are many--are partly grounded in the maladjustment of
economic conditions. The remedy lies in a change of environment in
which society as a whole must take part; in vocational training; a more
equitable adjustment of wage to labor; workmen’s compensation laws;
health and accident insurance; inculcation of ideas of temperance;
training along moral, domestic, sanitary, and hygienic lines; and
general education, including a knowledge of child-training.
Conditions are different, however, in the better homes of our citizens.
There the debasing consequences of sordid poverty are absent. But still
the two homes are, in many instances, identical in their lack of moral
training, although the causes are different. In the one home, knowledge
and capacity are wanting. In the other, knowledge and capacity are
present but neglected. It is these latter cases of parental neglect
of duty which warrant the appellation, “wayward parent.” It sometimes
requires the alarm clock of filial delinquency to awaken the parent
from his somnolence of indifference. The damage has then been done.
They hasten to lock the stable after the horse is stolen, instead of
taking precautionary measures at the needful time. “The difficult
cases to deal with,” remarks Judge Julius N. Mayer of the Court of
Special Sessions (Children’s Court) of New York City, “are the cases
of children whose parents are industrious and reputable, but who seem
to have no conception at all of their duties toward their children.
They fail to make a study of the child. They fail to understand
him. Frequently the father, who could well afford to give his child
recreation, or a little spending money, will hold his son by so tight
a rein that the child is bound to break away. It may seem a little
thing, but I firmly believe that many a child would be saved from his
initial wrong step if the parent would make him a small allowance. In
the cases where such a course is pursued the child usually becomes a
sort of a little business man, husbanding his resources and willing
to spend no more than his allowance; but where the child has nothing
it is not strange that he should fall into temptation.” The state of
Colorado, in an important addition to the juvenile law, recognizes
the existence of the wayward parent by declaring that all parents,
guardians, and other persons, who in any manner cause or contribute to
the delinquency of any child, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor. Judge
Lindsey of the Juvenile Court of Denver has this excoriation for such
parents: “Careless and incompetent parents are by no means confined
to the poor. In fact, in my experience, the most blameworthy of such
parents are among the so-called business men and prominent citizens.
They seem to think their duty is ended when they have debauched the
boy with luxury and the free use of money. They permit him to fill his
life with a round of pleasure, and let him satiate his appetite without
knowing what he is doing or whither he is drifting. They are too busy
to become his chum or companion, and so he soon develops a secret and
private life, which is often filled with corruption, and because of his
standing or influence and money he may be kept out of the courts or
the jails, but nevertheless is eventually added to society as a more
dangerous citizen than many men who have been subjected to both. A
financially well-to-do father once said to me that he was too busy to
look after his boys, to be companionable, or take an interest in them.
We have no more dangerous citizens than such men. In the end, I believe
such a man would profit more by less business and better boys.”
Parental laxness in the enforcement of discipline may be due to
indifference, obtuseness, or a false sense of affection which rebels
at stern correctional measures. Whatever may be the motive of the
parent, the effect on the child is the same. Obedience is largely a
matter of habit which becomes fixed, as do other habits, by continued
repetition. Dr. William Byron Forbush stated the thought in this
language: “In the American home, especially where there is not sore
poverty, the cause of delinquency in children is, without question, the
flabbiness and slovenliness of parents in training their children to
obedience and to orderly habits.”
Too often the training of the boy is shunted back and forth from father
to mother like a shuttlecock which is finally knocked out of bounds.
The father more frequently than the mother succeeds in evading the
obligation and thereafter he rarely attempts to interfere unless we
consider an occasional walloping of his son in anger the accomplishment
of his duty.
The average parent is not fully equipped for his job. He is either
unskilled or underskilled in boy-training. He needs education,
insight, and understanding to cope with the problems of his son.
If the parents default in the training of the boy--even through
ignorance--need we wonder that the boy defaults in the making of the
man?
Numerous boys attain the average perfection of manhood in spite of poor
training--but none of them because of it. Many a father, because his
son has turned out well, is wearing a self-imposed halo--when he is
only lucky.