THE ART OF PARENTAL GIVING
Parents must be made to see that the really irrepressible conflicts
are not begun when children are fourteen, sixteen and eighteen but
rather four, six, eight; in other words, are ascribable to causes long
anterior to the occasions which disclose their unavoidableness. Thus
parents may find themselves in collision with maturing children over
the utterly sordid and gleamless character of their lives, or, what is
not less grave in its consequences, their "visionary and impractical
ways, so different from our well-tried _modus vivendi_." It is quite
safe to predict the rise of conflict of one character or another when
parents are unmindful of the higher responsibilities of their
vocation, the responsibility of making clear to children the reality
of moral and spiritual values.
The supreme parental responsibility is to give or to help children to
achieve for themselves those standards by which alone men truly live,
to give to children the impulse that shall reveal not what they may live
by but what they ought to live for. The one potent way to avoid future
conflict is so to make for, not point to, a goal that children shall not
become mere money-grubbers or perpetuators of ancient prejudices or
maintainers of false values or lawless upholders of the law.
Parents would do well to have in mind that the most just and terrible
of reproaches are often left unspoken. I am thinking of a youth who
had inherited a very large fortune. Happening to point out to him to
what uses his means might be put, this youth replied: "My parents
never ceased to tell me what not to do, but they never told me what it
is that I ought to do. There are no _oughts_ in my life which I have
gotten from my father. I have learned what I ought not to do and I
suppose that I know that." This was the young heir's revolt and, if
his word be true, wholly just revolt against the spirit of those
parents who seem to imagine it to be enough if they teach their
children such fundamentals as the perils of violating statutory law,
the inexpediency of coming into conflict with those ordinances which
it is the part of convention never to violate.
In one word, it is not enough to forbid and interdict. Obedience to
_don'ts_, however multitudinous, is not even the beginning of morality
though it lead to a certain degree of personal security. Forbidding
one's children to steal may keep them out of jail, but that is hardly
the highest end of life. More must be given them, such affirmations of
faith and life as make for high ideals, for true standards, for real
values. I have heard parents, lamenting over a child's misconduct,
offer the following in self-exculpation: "I never did or said anything
that was wrong in the presence of my children," it being forgotten
that children may be present unseen, that they may overhear the
unuttered. But, one is tempted to ask, Did you by any chance or of
design say or do aught in the presence of your child that was
affirmatively and persuasively right?
I can never forget a scene I witnessed many years ago. Shortly after
the passing of his father, a son entered the death chamber, shook his
fist in the face of his dead father and exclaimed with tearless and
yet heartbreaking grief: "You are responsible for the ruin of my
life." Later I learned that the father was a mere accumulator of money
who had believed every paternal duty to have been fulfilled because he
gave and planned to bequeath possessions to his children. Multitudes
of parents there are who during their lifetime should be made
conscious of the lives they are suffering to go to wreck, theirs the
major responsibility. Happily for some parents, most children who
survey the ruin of their lives fail to fix the responsibility where it
properly belongs,--in parental neglect of the obligation to bring to
children moral stimulus and spiritual guidance.
But the important thing for parents is not to guard their speech lest
children overhear them but to guard their souls that children be free
to see all. If Emerson was right with respect to a man's character
uttering itself in every word he speaks, this is truest of all within
the microcosm of the home, wherein children are relentlessly attentive
to parental speech and silence alike, pitiless assessors of omission
as well as commission. What parents are, not what they would have
themselves imagined to be by children, shines through every word and
act, however scrupulous be parental vigilance over speech and conduct.
It may be very important for parents to be watchful of their tongues
as they are rather frequently urged to be. But it is rather more
imperative to be watchful over their lives. We are tempted to forget
that parental duties are positive as well as negative, that it is not
enough for parents not to hurt a child, not to do injury to his moral
and spiritual well-being. For of all beings parents must, paraphrasing
the word of the German poet, be aggressively and resistlessly good,
pervasively beneficent, throughout their contact with a child.
It is a problem whether it be more necessary to counsel children to
honor parents or to bid parents be deserving as far as they may be of
the honor of children. Years ago a great teacher of the nation pleaded
as men commonly plead for reverence and honor on the part of children
toward parents. But in truth we have no right to plead for reverence
filial unless to that plea there be added solemn entreaty to the
elders to make it possible for the young to do them reverence and
honor. When we, the elders of this day, bemoan the want of unity
between our children and ourselves, let us not be so sure of our
children's unworthiness but rather ask ourselves whether we are worthy
of that which our parents enjoyed at our hands, the reverence and
honor which must needs underlie unity in the home.
Honor, in a word, must lie in the daily living of parents ere they may
await it at the hands of children. The father, who is nothing more
than a cash register or coupon-scissors, is undeserving of honor from
children, however many and goodly be his gifts to them. And the
mother, whose life is given to the trivialities and inanities of every
season's mandate, merits not her children's reverence despite all
Biblical injunction. Children cannot be expected to do more than
outward and perfunctory obeisance to fathers who care solely for the
things of this world, success however achieved, money however gained
and used, power whatever its roots and purposes, nor do honor to
mothers whose passion is for the lesser and the least things of life.
I remember to have estranged a dear friend by urging in the pulpit that,
unless parents strive as earnestly to merit honor as children should
seek to yield it, they will not have it nor yet have been deserving of
it. Let us for a moment get a nearer glimpse of how the matter works out
from day to day. How can a mother whose life is spent in pursuit of the
worthless expect reverence, though the time may come when she will yearn
for it and rue her failure to have won it? The disease of incessant
card-playing has laid low multitudes of wives and mothers, that
card-gambling which has been described by former President Eliot as an
extraordinarily unintelligent form of pleasurable excitement.
There was a time when, in the speech of the Apocryphal teacher of
wisdom men strove for the prizes that were undefiled. But the prizes
of the card table are not only defiled but defiling. They fill the
lives of women not a few with mentally hurtful and morally enervating
excitement. The substitution of the delirium of the gaming table for
the durable satisfactions of life that come from worth-while
intellectual pursuits is ever a disaster. What manner of children are
to be reared by a generation of bridge-experts, of women half-crazed
with the pleasures of the card-table, to whom no prize of life is as
precious as the temptation of bridge-whist. I recently heard the
recital of a bit of conversation between parent and child: "Mother, is
card playing terribly important?" "Why do you ask?" "Well, I went to
see my aunt and she was playing cards with three friends, and, when
grandmother came into the room, no one rose to meet her. So I thought
that the game must be awfully important and the prizes very fine or
they would have arisen when grandma entered, wouldn't they?"
Even if there were no fear of later conflict, it would still be the
duty of parents to give themselves to children, that is to have
something to give, to make something of themselves that their gift be
worth while. And for the giving of self there can be no substitute
though one may reinforce oneself in many ways. Parents cannot give
themselves to children vicariously. A young woman, mother of a little
one which I had expected to find with her, calmly answered my inquiry
touching the child, "A child's place is with its nurse." One begins to
understand the tale of the little girl who declared that when she was
grown she wished to be a nurse so that she might be with her children.
There may be and are times when a child's place is with its nurse if
the household be burdened with one, but to lay it down as a general
rule that a child's place is always apart from its mother and by the
side of its nurse is to disclose the manner of maternal neglect in the
homes of many well-circumstanced folk. I have said before that Lincoln
is to be congratulated rather than commiserated with upon the fact
that he had little schooling and no nurses, seeing that in the place
of schools, teachers, nurses, governesses, he had a mother and the
immediacy of her unvicarious care.
Unless parental-filial contact be direct rather than intermediate,
parents cannot help a child to be as well as to have and to do, to
live as well as to earn a livelihood. Parents can give a child little
or nothing until they learn that a child is more than a body or
intellect, a body to be fed and clothed, a mind to be furnished and
trained. When parents come to remember that a child is, not has, a
soul to be developed, they will cease to stuff their children's bodies
and cram their minds while starving their souls. How often, alas, do
parents pamper their children in their lower nature while pauperizing
their higher nature, because of their failure to see that not alone
were they co-authors of a child-body but that they are to be the
continuing re-makers of a child's mind and spirit.
Are there quite enough parents like the father of a friend into whose
young hands at leave-taking from home his father placed a Bible and a
copy of the poems of Burns with the parting word,--Love and cling to
both, but if you must give up the Bible cling to Burns. But verily we
can give nothing more to our children than clothes and food and money
until we remember to make something of ourselves. It is not easy for
the stream of domestic influence to rise higher than the parental
level. Time and again I have heard a father exclaim: "I am going to
leave my boy so well off that he won't have to shoulder the burdens
which all but crushed me." Less often have I seen a father so rear
his son that he revealed his inmost purpose to be the fostering of his
son's nobleness. Are there as many parents who would have their
children finely serviceable as highly successful?