WARS THAT ARE NOT WARS
Every difference between parent and child is somehow assumed to be
rooted in and ascribable to the inherent perversities of the
parental-filial relation. When scrutinized, these will often be found
to be wholly unrelated thereto. Ever are parents and children ready to
take it for granted that their clashing arises out of the relation
between them when in truth, viewed dispassionately and from the
vantage-ground of remoteness, parent and child are not pitted against
each other at all. They are persons whose conflict has not the
remotest bearing upon the relation that obtains between them. Would
not much heartache be avoided, if parents and children clearly
understood that the grounds of difference between themselves, however
serious and far-reaching these sometimes become, are not related to or
connected with the special relation that holds them together?
Thus the irritations of propinquity may not be less irritating when
seen to arise out of the fact of physical contact rather than from the
circumstance of intellectual antagonism or moral repulsion, but it is
well to know that such irritations are not the skirmishes of life-long
domestic war. I say "irritations of propinquity," for, excepting among
the angels, the status of propinquity cannot be permanently maintained
without at least semi-occasional irritation. Professor R. B. Perry,[F]
dealing with domestic superstitions, declares, in reference to
scolding: "The family circle provides perpetual, inescapable, intimate
and unseasonable human contacts.... Individuals of the same species
are brought together in every permutation and combination of
conflicting interests and incompatible moods.... The intimacy and
close propinquity of the domestic drama exaggerates all its values,
both positive and negative."
Not only does the unavoidable persistence of physical contacts
account, however unprofoundly, for occasional differences in the home,
but another and parallel circumstance ought never to be lost sight
of. There are two samenesses in the home, the sameness of blood and
the sameness of contacts. Putting it differently, the oneness of
environment for all the tenants of a home continues and sometimes
intensifies the strain in either sense of blood-oneness. This may
sound playful to those who have never bethought themselves touching
the enormous difficulties that arise in the home insofar as some
parents, having inflicted a certain heredity upon their offspring, are
free to burden these filial victims with an environment escape from
which might alone enable them to neutralize or palliate the evil of
their heritage. I have in an earlier passage asked the query whether
filial revolt is not the unconscious protest of children against the
authors or transmitters of hereditary defect or taint.
Let me name two types or kinds of what are held to be conflicts
between parents and children, which are not conflicts in any real
sense of the term; first, intellectual differences and, second, the
inevitable but impersonal antagonism of the two viewpoints or
attitudes which front each other in the persons of parent and child.
As for purely intellectual differences, it is well to have in mind the
world's current and suggestive use of the term "difference of
opinion"--Carlyle saying of his talk with Sterling: "Except in opinion
not disagreeing"--as if that in itself were quite naturally the
precursor of strife and conflict. If difference of opinion oft deepen
into conflict, is it not because in the home as in the world without
we have not mastered the high art of patiently hearing another
opinion? Graham Wallas[G] would urge: "A code of manners which
combined tolerance and teachability in receiving the ideas of others,
with frankness and, if necessary courageous persistence in introducing
one's own ideas.... Whether we desire that our educational system
should be based on and should itself create a general idea of our
nation as consisting of identical human beings or of indifferent human
beings" is the problem with which Wallas[H] faces us.
In the world without men may flee from one another but the walls of
the home are more narrow. And within the home-walls, for reasons to be
set forth, the merest differences of opinion, however honestly
conceived and earnestly held, may be viewed as pride of ancient
opinion on the one hand and forwardness of youthful heresy on the
other. Parents are no more to be regarded as intolerably tyrannical
because of persistence in definite opinions than children are to be
viewed as totally depraved or curelessly dogmatic because of
unrelinquishing adherence to certain viewpoints. I am naturally
thinking of normal parents, if normal they be, who would rather be
right than prevail, not of such parents as imagine that they must
never yield even an opinion, nor yet of children surly and snarling
who do not know the difference between vulgar self-insistence and high
self-reverence. For the father a special problem arises out of the
truth that the mother presides over the home as far as children are
concerned and as long as they remain children, and he steps in to
"rule" ordinarily after having failed through non-contacts to have
established a relationship with children. This is the more
regrettable because often it becomes almost the most important
business of a father, through studied or feigned neglect, to
neutralize the over-zealous attention of a mother, such attention as
makes straight for over-conventionalization.
To regard differences of opinion as no more than differences of
opinion will always be impossible to parents and children alike until
these have learned how to lift these things to and keep them on an
impersonal level. And of one further truth, previously hinted at,
parents and children must become mindful,--that what, viewed
superficially and personally, is their clashing, is nothing more than
the wisdoms of the past meeting with the hopes of the future--past and
future embodied in declining parent and nascent child.
Because of their fuller years and the circumstance of protective
parenthood, parents are conservators, maintainers, perpetuators. Because
of their uninstructed years and freedom from responsibility, children
often become radical, uprooters and destroyers at the imperious behest
of the future. These impersonal clashings of past and future can be kept
on an impersonal basis, provided parents can bring themselves to see
that things are not right merely because they have been and that things
are not wrong solely because they have not been before.
Perhaps at this point, though parents have experience to guide them
and children only hopes to lead them, it is for parents to exercise
the larger patience with hope's recruits, even though these find light
and beauty alone in the rose tints of the future's dawn. Felix Adler
has wisely said: "A main cause is the presumption in favor of the
latest as the best, the newest as the truest.... The passion for the
recent reacts on the respect or the want of respect that is shown to
the older generation.... Now if one group of persons pulls in one
direction and another group pulls in exactly the opposite direction,
there is strain; and if the younger generation pulls with all its
might in the direction of changing things, and if the older generation
leans back as far as it can and stands for keeping things as they are,
then there is bound to be a tremendous tension."
It may be true, as has lately been suggested by the same wise teacher,
that the children of our time are in protest against parents, because
these are the authors and agents of the sadly blundering world by them
inherited. Is it not also true and by children to be had in mind that
parents are fearful of the ruthless urge and, as it seems, relentless
drive of the generation to be, which become articulate in the
impatiences of youth? Dealing with the difference that arises out of
the fact of parents facing pastward and children futureward, Professor
Perry declares[I]: "The domestic adult is in a sort of backwash. He is
looking toward the past, while the children are thinking the thoughts
and speaking the language of tomorrow. They are in closer touch with
reality, and cannot fail, however indulgent, to feel that their
parents are antiquated.... The children's end of the family is its
budding, forward-looking end: the adult's end is, at best, its root.
There is a profound law of life by which buds and roots grow in
opposite direction."
It were well for parents and in children to remember that past and
future meet in the contacts of their common present, and that these
conflict-provoking contacts are due neither to parental waywardness
nor to filial wilfulness. These are not unlike the seething waters of
Hell Gate, the tidal waters of river and sound, meeting and clashing,
and out of their meeting growing the eddies and whirlpools which have
suggested the name Hell Gate bears. Through these whirling waters
there runs a channel of safety, the security of the passerby depending
upon the unresting vigilance of the navigator. The whirl of the waters
is not less wild because the meeting is the meeting of two related
bodies, two arms of the self-same sea.