THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE
§ 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE
The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher
and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the
family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in
what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons.
This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for
ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations.
That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may
become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy
principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his
place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able
to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of
meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes
of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this
end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal
person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect
poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we knew this was the
only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of
character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must
endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that
Love and joy are torches lit
At altar fires of sacrifice.
With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask,
What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we
need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in
character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic
arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the
organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so
worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?
§ 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--SOCIAL QUALITIES
The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of
the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The
infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a
man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live
in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the
widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school,
city, state, and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps
before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the
few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he
takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other
folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.
Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training.
The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born.
Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is
interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social
organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer
to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any
other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is
maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and
standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an
ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the
greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for
the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to
extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly,
ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share
in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and
to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group is the best
possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state,
and for world-living.[5] The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as
a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its
peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of
manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller
group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life.
The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group.
The small social organization, the family circle of from three members
to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient
school, training youth to live in social terms.
Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially
needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise
above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal
qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes
most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures
every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its
riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal
qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations,
affection. The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose
the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only
the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the
world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's
spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No
life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that
lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.
§ 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--THE MORAL LIFE
Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be
noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.
"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here
the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins
life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all
virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them,
"the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The
moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived
for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a
matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. Neither is it a matter
of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this
comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life
which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the
right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of
rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society
points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right
thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner
compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest
possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of
loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which
begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in
the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most
potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are
strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to
those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the
loyalty, or the love?
The power of this small social group of the family to develop the
fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a
position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well
to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will
strengthen the ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the
care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and
oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward
affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would
in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and
mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in
orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal
care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents
stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small
children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the
ideal--a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but
these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds
and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their
affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by
providing adequate training of parents for their duties.
Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its
apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to
keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family.
It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now
delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more
serious is the cost in care, in nerves, in patience, in all the great
elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he
has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that
which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal
objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from
centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many
bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying,
fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor
does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must
learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service.
One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the
practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The
single child in a family misses something more important than playmates;
he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember
many families that have grown to beauty of character under the
discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real
sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that
blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for
a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.
A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the
family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties
of blood and similarity, for purposes of the development of personal
character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing
in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers
of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose
and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their
ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the
vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals.
The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its
full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels.
The educational function suggests the features of family life which we
do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the
essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and
character must be maintained at any cost.
I. References for Study
C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee &
Shepard, $1.60.
W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. iv, v. Hodder &
Stoughton, $2.50.
II. Further Reading
"The Improvement of Religious Education," _Proceedings of the
Religious Education Association_, I, 119-23. $0.50.
_Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.
S.P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott, _The Delinquent Child and the
Home_. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.
III. Topics for Discussion
1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?
2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?
3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups
for educational purposes?
4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?
5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.
6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character
development? In what way do these come to the surface in the
family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?
7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain
or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial
advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent
disadvantages in the life of the family?
FOOTNOTES:
[5] See "Democracy in the Home," _American Journal of Sociology_,
January, 1912.
[6] Francis G. Peabody, _The Approach to the Social Question_, p. 94.