THE DEMOCRATIC REGIME IN THE HOME
The parental-filial relation is almost the only institution of society
that has not consciously come under the sway of the democratic regime
or rather influences. Within a century, the world has passed from the
imperial to the monarchical and from the monarchical to the democratic
order--save in two rather important fields of life, industry and the
home. In these two realms the transformation to the democratic modus
remains to be effected,--I mean of course the conscious, however
reluctant, acceptance thereof. True it is that many children and fewer
parents have made and will continue to make it for themselves, but the
process is one which the concerted thought and co-operative action of
parents and children can far better bring to consummation. The
difficulty of the transformation is increased almost indefinitely by
the microscopic character of the family unit. It is not easy to keep
the open processes of the State up to the standards of democracy,--how
much more difficult the covert content of the inaccessible home!
In all that parents do with respect to the home, assuming their
acceptance of the democratic order and its requirements, they may not
forget that the home, like every educational agency of our time, must
"train the man and the citizen." Milton's insistence is not less
binding today than it was when first uttered nearly three centuries
ago. A man cannot be half slave and half free. He cannot be fettered
by an autocratic regime within the home and at the same time be a free
and effective partner in the working out of the processes of
democracy. Democracy and discipline are never contradictory and the
discipline of democracy can alone be self-discipline. Professor Patten
in his volume, "Product and Climax,"[J] hints at a real difficulty:
"We want our children to retain the plasticity of youth, and yet we
believe in a disciplinary education and love to put them at difficult
tasks, having no end but rigidity of action and a narrower viewpoint.
At the same breath we ask for heroes and demand more democracy."
What is really involved when the matter is reduced to its simplest
terms, is seen to be a new conception of the home. For many centuries,
it has been a world or realm wherein parents filled a number of roles
or parts,--chief among these regents on thrones, dispensers of bounty,
teachers of the infant mind. Any survey of the home today that surveys
more than surface things must take into account one other figure,--or
set of figures,--the figure of a child. And the child not as the
subject of the parental regent, however wise, nor yet as the
unquestioning pupil of the parental tutor, however infallible! The
home can no longer remain, amid the crescent sway of the democratic
ideal, a kingdom with one or two or even more thrones, nor yet a
debating society. Shall we say parliament, seeing that in Parliament
and Congress it is reputed to be the habit of men to plead for truth
rather than for victory?
The home must become a school wherein parents and children alike sit
as eager learners and humble teachers, a school for parents in the
latter days in the arts of renunciation and for children in the fine
arts of outward courtesy and inward chivalry. In such a classroom the
child will learn to think non-filially for itself, though it will not
cease to feel filially. Under such auspices, the child will be neither
a manageable nor an unmanageable thing but a person bent upon
self-direction and self-determination through the arts of
self-discipline. In the interest of that self-discipline which
parental example can do most to foster, let it be remembered by
parents that no rule is as effective with children as self-mastery,
that the only convincing and irrefutable authority is inner
authoritativeness. Spencer has laid down the ideal for the home: "to
produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed
by others." If parents are so unwise as to postpone and deny the right
of children to live their lives until after their parents are dead, it
may be that these will die too late for their own comfort. Parents who
rely upon parental authority, whatever that may mean, in dealing with
children ought to be quietly chloroformed or peacefully deposited in
the Museum of Natural History by the side of the almost equally
antique Diplodoccus.
The teacherless classroom, the school which is without direction and
without dogma _ex cathedra_, is a peculiarly fitting metaphor to
invoke. It may serve to remind children that the newly achieved
equivalence of the home is not to result in parental subjection or
subordination, that the inviolable rights of personality are not
exactly a filial monopoly,--crescent filial tyranny being little less
intolerable than obsolescent parental despotism--that the passing of
the years does not make it exactly easier to abandon or to forswear
personality. It were little gain to substitute King Log of filial rule
for King Stork of parental command. Filial domination, in other words,
is not less odious because of its novelty. In a recent number of _The
Outlook_, E. M. Place, writing on "Democracy in the Home," puts it
well: "There are two kinds of despotism in the home that are alike and
equally intolerable: One is parental and the other is filial."
Bernard Shaw[K] is quite unparadoxical and almost commonplace in his
fear that there is a possibility of home life oppressing its inmates.
The peril is not of revolt against the oppressions of home life by its
inmates but of unrevolting submission which were far worse on their
part. From such oppressions there is but one escape, the deliberate
introduction of a democratic regime. "It is admitted that a democracy
develops and trains the individual while an autocracy dwarfs and
represses the possibilities within. The parent who is autocratic, who
says do this and do that because I say so without appealing to the
reason and judgment of the child, can never create the real home, the
one in which good citizens are made. The democratic home where the
individual welfare and the general welfare are given due
consideration, where conduct is the result of the appeal to reason, is
as much the right of the child as a voice in his own government is the
right of an adult."
And one thing more! Some marriages are intolerable and the only way of
peace, not of cowardice or of evasion, is the way out. Without at
this time entering into the question whether the multiplicity of
divorces is imperilling the social order, I make bold to say that it
ought not be considered an enormity on the part of children nor an
indictment of parents, if parents and adult children conclude to live
apart, unharassed and untortured by the conditions of propinquity.
Fewer children would enter into obviously fatal marriages if marriage
were not regarded as the only decent and respectable way out of the
home for a daughter. Who does not know of young people marrying in
order to escape from the home? I do not mean to imply that all young
people who desire to escape from the home are the victims of domestic
repression and parental tyranny, but I have often deemed it lamentable
that, for some young people as I have known them, marriage offered the
only excuse or pretext for taking oneself out of the home. Such
self-exile from home by the avenue of marriage often leads to tragedy
graver than any from which it was sought to take refuge. But a
democratic regime in the home must include the possibility of
honorable and peaceable withdrawal therefrom.
It should be said by way of parenthesis that marriage is not always a
secure refuge from the undemocratically ordered home. For parental
intervention in the life of married children is not unimaginable.
Under my observation there came some months ago the story of parents,
who quite forcibly withdrew the person of their daughter and her
infant child from her and her husband's home because the latter was
unwilling or unable to expend a grotesquely large sum for its
maintenance. This is merely an exaggerated example of the insistence
on the part of parents on the unlessened exercise of that power of
control over children, which is the very negation of democracy.