The old home, with its family-room, evening-lamp, regular life,
and community of interests, has given place to a home in which
the family are all together for the first time in the day at the
evening meal, and then only for a brief hour, after which they
scatter to their several engagements. A little boy was asked by
a neighbor, as his father was leaving the house one morning,
who that gentleman was, and he replied: “Oh, I don’t know; he’s
the man who stays here nights.” This might well be a leaf from
the actual home life in our cities. In some cases fathers and
mothers too seldom see their children. Business claims their
daylight hours; committee, board, or lodge meetings claim their
evenings; and so the fathers are unavoidably, as it would seem,
away from home. The church and sundry organizations for social
service or self-improvement leave the mothers little time for
their own needy but uncomplaining households. The children have
their own friends and social life, in which the parents have all
too small a place and influence.--GEORGE B. STEWART,
“Journal of the Religious Education Association,” 1903.
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