REVERENCE THY SON AND THY DAUGHTER
Reverence thy son and thy daughter lest thy days seem too long in the
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. One of the elements making
for conflict between parent and child is the desire of parents who ask
for love, taking respect for granted, and the insistence of children,
taking love for granted, that parental respect be yielded them. There
are many causes that make mutual respect in any real sense difficult
between parent and child, parents asking love for themselves as
parents, children seeking respect for themselves as persons. After
dealing for two decades or nearly that with a child in the terms of
love, parents do not find it easy to treat a child with the reverence
that is offered to one deemed a complete, rational, unchildlike person.
An eminent theologian once declared that it was easy enough to love
one's neighbors but hard to like them. So might many parents in truth
say that it is easy, yea, inevitable, to love their children but very
difficult to yield them the reverence of which upon reflection they
are found to be deserving. And it happens that parents can and do give
their children all but the one thing which they insist upon having
from parents, namely, a decent respect. Such respect is in truth
impossible as long as parents always think of themselves as parents
and of children as children. The temptation presses to urge parents
sometimes to forget that they are parents, and to suggest to children
sometimes to remember that they are children--in any event,
semi-occasionally to recall that to parents children are ever and
quite explicably children.
Parents cannot begin too soon to treat children with respect. One of
the most disrespectful as well as stupid things that can be done in
relation to a child is to treat it like a monkey trained for
exhibition purposes in order to "entertain" some resident aunt or
visiting uncle. The worst way to prepare a child for self-respect is
to exhibit him to ostensibly admiring relatives as if he or she were
a rare specimen in a zooelogical garden. Too many of us are Hagenbacks
to our children, not so much for the sake of otherwise unoccupied
relatives or especially doting grandparents as for the sake of
flattering our own cheap and imbecile pride.
The relation of mutual respect cannot obtain between parent and child
as long as the instinct of parental proprietorship is dominant, as
long as there is a failure to recognize that a child's individuality
must be reckoned with. But there must be the underlying assumption
that a child's judgment may be entitled to respect, in other words, is
not inherently contemptible. Once assumed that a child may cease to be
a child and become a person able to think, decide, choose, act for
itself, there is no insuperable difficulty in determining when a
child's judgment is entitled to respect, provided of course by way of
preliminary that parents are ready to put away the pet superstition of
parental infallibility and impeccability. Nothing so calculated to win
a child's reverence as parental admission of fallibility generally and
of some error of thought and speech in particular!
One rarely hears or learns of a child who feels that parents fail to
love it but one comes upon children not a few, normal beings rather than
those afflicted with the persecution complex, who deeply lament the fact
that parents do not treat them with the reverence owing from normal,
wholesome beings to one another. It is this that more than anything else
makes some children impatient of the very name, children, the term with
its ceaseless implication of relative existence becoming odious to them.
No one will maintain that it is easy to achieve relations of reciprocal
reverence between parent and child, viewing the fact that family
intimacies while tending to foster affection do not make for the
strengthening of respect. For respect is most frequently evoked by the
unknown and unfamiliar even as the familiar and the known, because it is
known, touches the springs of affection. Parental reverence may not be
unachievable, but it involves the acceptance of a child as a
self-existent being, intellectually, morally, spiritually.
One of the results of the liberating processes of our age is the
deeping consciousness of children that they have the unchallengeable
right to live their own lives, under freedom to develop their own
personalities. Revolting against the superimposition of parental
personality, the more deadening because childhood is imitative, they
have begun to hearken to Emerson's counsel to insist upon themselves.
Too often they carry their fidelity to this monition to the
illegitimate length of insistence upon idiosyncracy rather than of
emphasis upon personality. To cherish and defend every fleeting
opinion as sacred and unamendable dogma is not insistence upon self
but wilful pride of opinion. And yet even such self-insistence is
better than such self-surrender as dwarfs children and by so much
belittles parents.
It may seem superfluous to second the claim of children to
self-determination, but in truth parents have so long and so
crushingly overwhelmed their once-defenceless children with the _force
majeure_ of their own personality that even a parent may welcome the
long-deferred revolt making for self-determination. The child has
rightfully resolved not to be a perfect replica,--usually a duplicate
of manifold imperfections,--but to be itself with all its own
imperfections on its head. This is the answer to the question whether
children ought ever suffer their minds to be coerced. Intellectual
compulsion and spiritual coercion are always inexcusable, though in
the interest of that much-abused term, the higher morality, children
may resort to the accommodation of conformity without sacrifice of the
substance of individuality and its basic self-respect.
And when I venture to hint at the concession of outward conformity
without of course doing violence to the scruples of conscience, the
concession that will bid children to tread the pathway of conformity in
externals, I call to mind and to witness a quarter-century's experience
in the ministry. In the course of it, it has fallen to my lot to be
consulted by numerous children. In only one case has a child said to me,
I regret my obedience to my parents' will. But times without number have
children said to me, How I rejoice, though sometimes it seemed hard,
that I followed the counsel of my mother, that I yielded to my father's
will. But one may not bid parents reverence their children and respect
their sense of freedom without intimating to children, howsoever
reluctantly, that even parents have some inalienable rights, and that
children ought to accord some freedom to parents, even though these be
likely to abuse it. Parents, too, must be regarded as free agents.
Filial usurpation of parental freedom is not wholly unprecedented in
these days of reappraisal of most values.
Parents and children alike will be helped to reverence one another as
free agents when they learn that infringement upon the freedom of
another is for the most part such an obtrusion of self into the life
of another as grows out of the contentlessness of one's own life. No
man or woman whose life is full and worth-while has enough of spare
time and strength to find it possible to meddle in busy-bodying
fashion with the life of others. Nagging, no matter by whom, is just
domestic busy-bodying, growing out of the failure to respect the
personality of another and out of the vacuity of one's own life.
Nagging, however ceaseless, is not correction. Conflict must not be
confounded with scolding any more than love and petting are the same
thing. Scolding, nagging, ceaseless fault-finding, these are not
conflicts nor even the symptoms thereof. These are usually nothing
more than signs of inner conflict and unrest finding petty and
unavailing, because external, outlets. No home irrespective of
circumstance can be free from conflict in which there is a failure to
understand that every member of the household is a self-regarding and
inviolate personality and that the physical contacts of the family
life are no excuse for the ceaseless invasion of personality.
I have not said economically, though it is not always easy for parents
to remember that economic dependence in no wise involves intellectual,
moral, spiritual dependence. The difficulty, as has already been
pointed out, is greatly enhanced by reason of the fact that parents
and children are too apt to label and classify and pigeon-hole one
another, parents assumed to be visionless maintainers and conservators
of the status quo and children regarded as vandal disturbers of the
best possible of worlds.
To confound voluntary reverence with the obligations of gratitude is
indeed the woefullest of blunders. I have sometimes thought that the
parental-filial relationship is not infrequently strained because it
rests upon bounty or indebtedness, acknowledged or unacknowledged.
There is a strain which ofttimes proves too hard to be borne between
benefactor and beneficiary. This strain may be eased if parents will
but avoid thinking of themselves as benefactors and children will but
remember that the fact of adolescence or post-adolescence does not
cancel all the relationships and conditions of earlier life. I cannot
conceive of deeper unwisdom than to rest one's case with children in
the matter of unyielded obedience or ungranted reverence or aught else
upon the basis of gratitude. It is as futile as it is vicious to dream
of exacting gratitude, seeing that gratitude is not a debt to be paid,
least of all a toll to be levied. Is there really much to choose
between the parent plaintively appealing for filial gratitude and the
termagant wife insistently clamoring for love.
If parents bent upon having gratitude and appreciation would but
remember that during the years in which parents do most for their
children the latter are blissfully unconscious, it would help them
over the rough places of seeming inappreciation and ingratitude. The
first ten years of a child's life are those of most constant and
tender service on the part of parents, the period of deepest anxieties
and uttermost sacrifices. And yet the fact of infancy and early
childhood precludes the possibility of remembrance, understanding,
appreciation. The conscious relation of parent and child does not
really begin much before the tenth year.
A wise teacher of the Northwest once said: "Children are either too
young or too old to be physically punished." Something of the same
kind might be said with respect to appeals for gratitude. Either these
are unnecessary or else they are unavailing. In any event, the
relation between parent and child must never be brought down to the
level of one of bestowal and acceptance of bounty and the obligations
thereby entailed. The highest magnanimity is needed on the part of
parents, so deep and uncancellable is the debt of children,--by
parents to be obliterated from memory, by children to be translated
into the things of life.