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CHILD _vs._ PARENT
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
CHILD VERSUS PARENT
_Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict
in the Home_
BY
STEPHEN S. WISE
RABBI OF THE FREE SYNAGOGUE
Author of "The Ethics of Ibn Gabirol," "How to Face Life,"
"Free Synagogue Pulpit," etc.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1922.
BROWN BROTHERS, LINOTYPERS
NEW YORK
TO THE MEMORY
OF
MY MOTHER,
SABINE DE FISCHER WISE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. FACING THE PROBLEM 1
II. BACK OF ALL CONFLICTS 11
III. SOME PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES UNMET 19
IV. THE ART OF PARENTAL GIVING 30
V. THE OBLIGATION OF BEING 41
VI. WARS THAT ARE NOT WARS 53
VII. CONFLICTS IRREPRESSIBLE 62
VIII. CONFLICTING STANDARDS 69
IX. THE DEMOCRATIC REGIME IN THE HOME 76
X. REVERENCE THY SON AND THY DAUGHTER 84
XI. THE OBSESSION OF POSSESSION 94
XII. PARENTS AND VICE-PARENTS 104
XIII. WHAT OF THE JEWISH HOME? 113
XIV. THE JEWISH HOME TODAY 120
XV. THE SOVEREIGN GRACES OF THE HOME 127
CHAPTER I
FACING THE PROBLEM
One way of averting what I have called the irrepressible conflict is
to insist that, in view of the fundamental change of attitude toward
the whole problem, the family is doomed. Even if the family were
doomed, some time would elapse before its doom would utterly have
overtaken the home. In truth, the family is not doomed quite yet,
though certain views with respect to the family are,--and long ought
to have been,--extinct. Canon Barnett[A] was nearer the truth when he
declared: "Family life, it may be said, is not 'going out' any more
than nationalities are going out; both are 'going on' to a higher
level." To urge that the problem of parental-filial contact need not
longer be considered, seeing that the family is on the verge of
dissolution, is almost as simple as the proposal of the seven-year-old
colored boy in the children's court, in answer to the kindly inquiry
of the Judge: "You have heard what your parents have to say about you.
Now, what can you say for yourself?" "Mistah Judge, I'se only got dis
here to say: I'd be all right if I jes had another set of parents."
For the problem persists and is bound to persist as long as the
relationships of the family-home obtain. The social changes which have
so markedly affected marriage have no more elided marriage than the
vast changes which have come over the home portend its dissolution. It
is as true as it ever was that the private home is the public hope. A
nation is what its homes are. With these it rises and falls, and it
can rise no higher than the level of its home-life. Marriage, said
Goethe, is the origin and summit of civilization; and Saleeby[B]
offers the wise amendment: "It would be more accurate to say 'the
family' rather than marriage." Assuming that the family which is the
cellular unit of civilization will, however modified, survive modern
conditions, the question to be considered is what burdens can the
home be made to assume which properly rest upon it, if it is to remain
worth while as well as be saved?
Nothing can be more important than to seek to bring to the home some of
the responsibilities with which other agencies such as school and church
are today unfitly burdened. False is the charge that school and church
fail to co-operate with the home. Truer is the suggestion that church
and school have vainly undertaken to do that which the home must largely
do. The teacher in church and school may supplement the effort of the
parent but cannot and may not be asked to perform the work of parents.
The school is overburdened to distraction, the church tinkers at tasks
which in the nature of things must fall to parents or be left undone.
And the school is attempting to become an agency for the universal
relief of the home, which cannot be freed of its particular
responsibilities even by the best-intentioned school or church.
Another quite obvious thesis is that conflicts arise between parents
and children not during the time of the latter's infancy or early
childhood but in the days of adolescence and early adulthood. The
real differences--rather than the easily quelled near-rebellions of
childhood--come to pass when child and parent meet on terms and
conditions which seem to indicate physical and intellectual equality
or its approach. I do not say that the processes of parental guidance
are to be postponed until the stage of bodily and mental equivalence
has been reached but that the conflicts are not begun until what is or
is imagined to be the maturity of the child raises the whole problem
of self-determination. The latter is a problem not of infants and
juveniles but of the mature and maturing.
It may be worth while briefly to indicate the various stages or phases
of the relationship of parents and children. In the earliest period,
parents are for the most part youngish and children are helpless. This
period usually resolves itself into nothing more than a riot of
coddling. In the next stage, parents begin to approach such maturity
as they are to attain, while children are half-grown reaching ten or
twelve years. This is the term of unlessened filial dependence,
though punctuated by an ever-increasing number of "don't." In the
third stage parents at last attain such maturity as is to be their
own,--years and maturity not being interchangeable terms,--for,
despite mounting years some parents remain infantile in mind and
vision and conduct. Children now touch the outermost fringe or border
of maturity in this time of adolescence, and the stage of friction,
whether due to refractory children or to undeflectible parents,
begins. Coddling has ended, or ought to have ended, though it may
persist in slightly disguised and sometimes wholly nauseous forms.
Dependence for the most part is ended, save of course for that
economic dependence which does not greatly alter the problem.
The conflict now arises between what might roughly be styled the
parental demand of dutifulness and the equally vague and amorphous
filial demand for justice--justice to the demands of a new
self-affirmation, of a crescent self-reliance. And after the storm and
fire of clashing, happily there supervenes a still, small period of
peace and conciliation unless in the meantime parents have passed, or
the conflict have been followed by the disaster of cureless
misunderstanding. It may be well, though futile, to remind some children
that it is not really the purpose of their parents to thwart their will
and to stunt their lives and that the love of parents does not at filial
adolescence, despite some Freudian intimations, necessarily transform
itself into bitter and implacable hostility. To such as survive, parents
aging or aged and children maturing or mature, this ofttimes becomes the
period most beauteous of all when children at last have ceased to make
demands and are bent chiefly upon crowning the aging brows of parents
with the wreath of loving-tenderness.
One further reservation it becomes needful to make. I must need limits
myself more or less to parental-filial relations as these develop in
homes in which it becomes possible for parents consciously to influence
the lives of their children, not such in which the whole problem of life
revolves around bread-winning. I do not consider the latter type of home
a free home. It is verily one of the severest indictments of the social
order that in our land as in all lands bread-winning is almost the sole
calling of the vast majority of its homes. I do not maintain that all
problems are resolved when this problem is ended, but the fixation
respectively of parental and filial responsibilities hardly becomes
possible under social-industrial conditions which deny leisure and
freedom from grinding material concern to its occupants.
The miracle of high nurture of childhood is enacted in countless homes
of poverty and stress, but the miracle may not be exacted. It was hard
to resist a bitter smile during the days of war, when the millions were
bidden to battle for their homes. Under the stress of war-conditions,
some degree of sufficiency, rarely of plenty, fell to the lot of the
homes of toil and poverty--the customary juxtaposition is not without
interest. But now that the war is ended, the last concern of the masters
of industry is to maintain the better and juster order of the war days,
and the primary purpose seems to be to penalize "the over-rewarded and
greedy toilers" of the war-days, selfishly bent upon extorting all the
standards of decent living out of industry.
Cutting short this disgression, the direst poverty seems unable to
avert the wonder of parents somehow rearing their children to all the
graces of noble and selfless living. But, I repeat, this is a largesse
to society on the part of its disinherited, whose high revenge takes
the form of giving their best to the highest. We may, however, make
certain demands upon the privileged who reward themselves with leisure
and all its pleasing tokens and symbols. For these at least have the
external materials of home-building. Need I make clear that the homes
of too much are as gravely imperilled as the homes of too little?
Many homes survive the lack of things. Many more languish and perish
because of the superabundance to stifling of things, things, things.
The very rich are ever in peril of losing what once were their homes,
a tragedy almost deeper than that of the many poor who have no home to
lose. The law takes cognizance in most one-sided fashion of the fact
that a home may endure without moral foundations but that it cannot
exist without material bases. Despite attempts on the part of the
State or States to avert the breaking up of a home solely because of
the poverty of the widowed mother, it still is true that many homes
are broken up on the ground of poverty and on no other ground. Saddest
of all, mothers take it for granted that such break-up is unavoidable.
Only two reasons justify the State's withdrawal of a child from its
parental roof,--incurable physical and mental disability in a child,
whose parents are unable to give it adequate care, or moral disability
on the part of parents. If the latter ground be valid, material
circumstances ought no more to hold parent and child together than the
absence of them ought to drive parent and child apart. A child
resident on Fifth Avenue in New York may be in greater moral peril
than a little waif of Five Points. Societies for the prevention of
cruelty to children ought to intervene as readily when moral leprosy
notoriously pervades the home of the rich as the State intervenes when
children's health is neglected or their moral well-being endangered in
a home of poverty. I have sometimes thought that an orphan asylum
ought to be erected for the benefit of the worse than orphaned
children of some notoriously corrupt, even when not multi-divorced,
heads of society. Such a protectory for the unorphaned, though not
fatherless and motherless, might serve a more useful purpose than do
such orphanages as, having captured a child, yield it up reluctantly
even to the care of a normal home.