Part 1 (2/2)
The former involves a decision; the latter the conduct of a lifetime.
Once upon a time and not so long ago, it might have been said that parents are not responsible for the heredity of which they are the transmitters. Today, with certain limitations, we charge parents with the responsibility of heredity which they bestow or inflict as well as with the further and continuous responsibility of environment.
Whatever may be held with respect to the duty of parents as ”hereditarians,” there can be no doubt that it is the obligation of parents consciously to determine, as far as may be, the content of the home environment. I would go so far, and quite unjestingly, as to maintain that the least some parents can do for their children is through environmental influence to neutralize the heredity which they have inflicted upon them. Unhappily, it may be, we cannot choose our grandparents, but we can in some measure choose our grandchildren.
But environmental influence is more than a mouth-filling phrase.
Parenthood and the begetting of children are not quite interchangeable terms. The continuity of parental functioning is suggested by the Hebrew origin of the term, child, which is etymologically connected with builder, parents being not the architects of a moment but the builders of a lifetime. This means that we are consciously to determine the apparently indeterminable atmosphere of our children's life and home.
That this involves care of the bodily side of child-being goes without saying, but, as we have in another chapter pointed out, this stress seems to be needless. The primary and serious responsibility of parents is bound up with the education of a child. And the first truth to be enunciated is that parents can no more leave to schools the intellectual than to priest and church the moral training of a child.
I remember to have asked a father in a mid-Western city to which it had been brought home that its schools were gravely inadequate--why he, a man of large affairs, did not set out to remedy the conditions.
His answer was, ”I do my duty to the schools when I pay my school taxes.” This was not only wretched citizens.h.i.+p but worse parenthood and still worse economics. It does much to explain the failure of the American school which is over-tasked by the community and p.r.o.nounced a bankrupt, because it cannot accept every responsibility which the parental att.i.tude dumps upon it. However much the school can do and does, it cannot and should not relieve the home of duties which parents have no right under any circ.u.mstances to s.h.i.+rk. A wise teacher in a distant city once wrote to me, having reference to the peace problem: ”I personally see no hope for peace until something spiritual is subst.i.tuted for the wors.h.i.+p of the golden calf. And as a teacher I must say, if I speak honestly, that there is an increasing aversion to solitude and work both on the part of parents and pupils, due to false viewpoints of values and as to how the genuine can be acquired.”
Two of the, perhaps the two, most important influences in the life of the child are dealt with in haphazard fas.h.i.+on. Parents later wonder where children have picked up their strange ideals and their surprising standards. Not a few of the roots of later conflict can be traced back to the earlier years, when children find themselves in schools wholly without parental co-operation and flung at amus.e.m.e.nts bound to have a disorganizing effect upon their lives. While parents must accept the co-operation of the school, the latter cannot be a subst.i.tute for the home nor the teacher a subst.i.tute for the parent.
The school cannot operate in the place of the home, though it may co-operate with it. The school cannot do the work of a mother, not even the work of a father.
The same is true of parents in relation to college and university.
Again I am thinking not of the youth who works and wins his way to and through college but of that type of family in which a college education for the children is as truly its use and habit as golf-playing by the father after fifty. The college-habit, I have said, is a bit of form when it is not a penalty visited upon a youth, who, after an indifferent or worse record at a preparatory school, must be forced into and through college. All of the consequences of college-education except a degree many somehow manage to avert.
College education should be offered to youth as opportunity or reward, or parents will come to be shocked by the futility of it and the almost uniformly evil sequelae thereof. And parents have the right as upon them lies the duty to insist that their sons shall not loaf and rowdyize through four years at college and, when they do acquiesce in the ways and manner and outlays of the college-loafer and the college-rounder, they must not expect a bit of parchment to convert him into an alert, ambitious, industrious youth. If they do, as they are almost certain to do, the conflict will begin.
CHAPTER III
SOME PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES UNMET
I have sometimes thought that a glimpse of the want of deep and genuine concern touching the education of children is to be gotten in the rise of summer camps in great numbers during recent years. I do not deny the place or value of a camp for children and youth. I have come into first-hand contact with some admirable camps for boys and girls and, as I looked at some visiting parents, could not avoid the regret that the separation between parent and child was to be of a brief summer's duration. Two months in the year of absence from the home can hardly suffice to neutralize the effect of ten months of parental presence and contact. I quite understand that the ideal arrangement in some homes would be to send the child to camp during the summer months and to send the parents out of the home, anywhere, during the rest of the year, an arrangement that is not quite feasible in all cases.
My query is--granted the value of the camp, how many parents have thought the problem through for themselves, a query suggested not by the inferior character of some camps, but by the celerity with which the camp-craze has swept over the country. In many camps children are sure to profit irrespective of the character of the home whence they are sent, but surely there are some camps a stay in which can but little benefit children. Now why do camps so speedily multiply, and why are children being sent to them in droves? The real reason is other than the oft-cited difficulty of placing children decently in other than summer hotels.
The instant vogue of summer camps met a parental need, the need of doing something with and for children with whom, released from school, parents did not know how to live, finding in the camp an easy way out of a hara.s.sing difficulty. Why do parents so live that in order to have a simple, wholesome life for their children, it is necessary to send them off to the woods in so-called camps the charm of which lies in their maximum difference from hotels and in their parentlessness?
The unreasoned haste with which children flocked in mult.i.tudes to the camps is a testimony to the failure of parents to live in normal, intimate contact with their children, and a prophecy, I have no doubt, of the conflict certain to develop out of the stimulated difference in tastes between child and parents.
I, too, believe that children, especially city-reared children with all their sophistications and urbanities, should be brought nearer to the simplicities of nature during the vacation period. But why not by the side and in the company when possible of parents? The truth is that, apart from the merits and even excellence of some camps, parents are so little accustomed to living with their children that when the summer months force the child into constant contact with parents, the latter grow embarra.s.sed by the necessity for such contact, and the camp is chosen as a convenient way out of a serious domestic problem.
My complaint is not against camps but against the multiplication of them necessitated by the helplessness of parents who face the need of sharing the life of their children. And some of these parents are the very ones who will later wonder that ”our children have grown away from us.”
I am often consulted by parents who express their grief at that strange bent in their children, which moves a son or daughter to seek out low types of amus.e.m.e.nt and the companions.h.i.+p bound up therewith. I quiz the complaining parents and learn that no attempt was ever made parentally to cultivate cleaner tastes, that the child was incessantly exposed to all the vulgarities and indecencies of the virtually uncensored motion picture theatre. Recreation is become a really serious problem in our time, immeasurably more important than it was in the youth of the now middle-aged, such as the writer, when a Punch and Judy show and a most mild and quite immobile picture or stereopticon were considered the outstanding entertainments of the year.
How many parents take their children's amus.e.m.e.nt seriously, as they take their own, and are concerned that these shall be, as they can be made, free from all that is vulgar and unclean? If the well-to-do, who might have other recreations, are given to the motion picture, is it to be wondered at that in the poorer quarters of New York, if a child be too small to be tortured by being kept at the side of its parents throughout a motion picture performance, it may be checked in its go-cart as one would check an umbrella. There is an electric indicator on the side of the screen which flashes the check-number to inform parents when their child is in real or fancied distress.
A writer in the _Outlook_, May 19, 1915, deals with the vulgarizing of American children and particularly the vulgarizing and corrupting power of the movies. He commented editorially, as I have done elsewhere, on the extraordinary absence of parental care for the minds of children in curious contradiction to the supersedulous care of the body: ”Many influences are at work to vulgarize American children, and little is done by many parents to protect the mental health of their children.
Neither time nor money is spared to preserve them in vigor and strength, to protect them from contamination. Meanwhile, those minds are the prey of a great many influences, which, if not actually evil, are vulgarizing. What is going on is not so much the corruption of young people in America as their vulgarization.” Parents are not less vulgarized, but the awakening and shock come when children are grown and are found to show the effects of what was innocent amus.e.m.e.nt, of what proves to have been deeply corrupting and degrading to the spirit.
But it is not enough for parents to censor the theatres frequented by their children and when they can to debar them from attendance at disgustingly ”s.e.xy” plays. It is their business as far as they can to cultivate in their children the love of the best in letters and in the arts. It is not enough to call a halt to the pleasure-madness of our children; it is needful that their recreations be guided into wholesome and creative channels. Happily books and pictures and, though less so, music, are accessible to all, and it remains true that we needs must love the highest when we see or hear it. Intellectual companions.h.i.+p is a primal necessity in the home contacts. Partially because of the craze for visible and audible entertainment, we have lost the habit of reading. Why trouble to plough for ten or twelve hours through a volume when one may look upon its contents picturized within the duration of an evening's performance at the theatre and in addition the ”evil of solitariness” be avoided?
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