Parenting - Moral Sunshine

( Originally Published 1914 )

The inner and unconscious ideals of the parents are what teach the child; their remonstrances, their punishments, even their bursts of emotion, are to him but thunder and comedy; what they worship is what he desires and reflects.--Amiel's Journal.

A FEELING very nearly akin to despair is apt to over come the modern parent when he begins to try to learn something of what experts are saying and writing about education and child-training. At his first step into the new field, where he seeks illumination, he finds himself strained in an unavailing effort to catch a few explicit words of wisdom. There is such an intense difference of opinion among professional educators about the right methods to use that the parent is tempted to feel that his effort to enlighten himself has but increased his bewilderment. Without the requisite training or information to judge for himself, it seems to him that if' the educational experts disagree so heartily, there is little chance that anyone will know the truth. If they do not know, who can know, what is necessary in school discipline, or the age at which arithmetic should be begun, or whether co-education in high-schools is advisable, or the proper methods of teaching hygiene, or the relative advantages of vocational and purely academic training?

And yet, in spite of this difference of opinion among school authorities, we Americans have the fixed habit, when it comes to formal intellectual instruction, of turning our children, almost without exception, over to the existing school system. Our faith in it, surviving the attacks of innumerable critics, appears to be unshaken. At least when September comes, we send off our boys and girls to their classes with unvarying regularity, although nowadays not always without heartfelt prayers that the schools may somehow chance to be better than their critics claim.

The basis for this curious, traditional American faith in schools is often the subject of learned comment and discussion, but it occurs to me, looking at the matter from the parent's point of view, that possibly it is not so significant as it seems. It may very well be that we continue faithfully to send our children to school in spite of the frequent and picturesque attacks on that institution because we have a more or less conscious grasp of the fact that in most cases it is not the child's school, but his home, which determines what sort of child he shall be. It may be that we more or less consciously discern that character and not information is the important factor in the training of children, and that for the formation of character school influences are nothing compared to home influences. In any case, whether we know what we are doing or not, that is the clew most of us are following through the labyrinth. And it is our very own clew, with which educational experts have nothing to do. The responsibility of it rests upon our shoulders, and it is the greatest responsibility any - human being can have. If our children are provided with the right sort of home background, the queerest of experimental school-education will do them no harm ; and if their roots are set in the wrong kind of home soil, no amount of expert educational pruning and trimming and training will make them what they ought to be.

It is a providential thing that the question of the sort of home background which our children shall have is as much within our control as it is vital. And yet there is no axiom the truth of which is harder for us to realize. Our instinct is to cry out that what with enormous rents, high prices for clothes, beefsteak at goodness knows what a pound, domestic help unattainable, and hard times hovering ominously near, nothing is more tragically out of our control than the home background. But the fact remains, apprehended by us in our better moments, that with some few exceptions the real essentials of a sane, wholesome, active, and happy life for the children lie easily within our reach. There are, of course, families in the congested portions of city tenement districts who cannot (to the shame of our country be it said) command the conditions necessary for proper moral and physical child-life and child-growth, and there are some other families who are prevented from providing the right background by confirmed ill-health or desperate misfortune ; but it is safe to say that ninety-nine out of every hundred of us can by taking thought (the right kind of thought) provide our children with the essentials for normal and healthy growth to their full stature. By all means, therefore, let us take thought, but first let us be sure that we are taking " the right kind of thought." Let us clarify our minds as to our real purpose, let us question our-selves seriously about the home we are providing for our children. What ought we to furnish then if we are not to fail in our duty towards them? In the case of infants under a year, modern science, good doctors, and sensible trained nurses, all banging together at our hard heads for the last twenty years, have given us a big lift up out of the abysmal con-fusion of mind which afflicted the views of our grandmothers on the subject of babies. We know now that if we happen to have plenty of money, time, and strength, it is all very well to amuse ourselves by embroidering the baby's petticoats and trimming the little caps with ribbon, but that these fascinating occupations have nothing whatever to do with the welfare of the child, and are simply done to please ourselves. We now know that the baby needs and must have, though the Heavens fall, clean milk absolutely clean milk sterilized nursing bottles, and warm feet conditions which can be supplied as well in a gypsy encampment as in the palace of a king.

But in the case of older children we have not as yet so clearly in our heads the equally vital difference between the essentials of moral and intellectual life and those trimmings and embroideries of existence which our own vanity is always driving us on to obtain for our boys and girls. We do not with sufficient vividness understand that for them the essentials are not handsome nurseries, clothes in fashion, expensive schooling, well-to-do playmates, a plethora of toys, a succession of costly " amusements," or a life of physical ease all conditions which (luckily for the children) are out of the reach of most of us. The real essentials, which any of us can have by taking thought, are peace and harmony among the adults of the family ; an atmosphere of purposeful cheerful industry and clear-sightedness towards the children; and for them a life of intellectual freedom and physical activity. Now these conditions can be secured in a little five room house, in any moderate sized American town or village, or in the country, as easily as in a millionaire's mansion. Self-indulgence and laziness certainly can be discouraged more easily by the example of adults who expect, as a matter of course, to do a reasonable amount of real work themselves than by any amount of verbal exhortation or " manual training " in an atmosphere where the adults expect, as a matter of course, to do nothing but what pleases them.

It is only fair to admit that these right conditions are not easily to be secured anywhere in the world.

They are possessions too precious to be gained with-out effort. But the fact that they can be secured by almost any of us who is willing to put himself out enough to secure them throws on us the blame if our children grow up without having experienced these inestimable blessings. Inestimable blessings they are, and their absence is an inestimable handicap. They are desirable for adults, but for children they are essential, just as fresh milk, clean dishes, and warm feet are good for adults, but vitally essential for babies. To be sure, some babies do worry along on fly-infected milk and filthy nipples, but they grow up into adults with ruined digestions and lowered vitality. So in a home where irritability reigns, where the adults practice self-indulgence as consistently as their incomes will allow, and deal justly with the children whenever they happen not to feel too tired and nervous to do so, the children do grow up somehow, but they grow up with warped and crooked moral natures into one or another of the various life-failures so tragically common.

Luckily most mothers are not looking for the easy way to bring up their children, but are searching for the best way with whole-hearted fervor,: They are not prevented by selfishness from giving their children what is best for them, but only by dire confusion of mind, like the tired young mother who sat on my porch the other day, making tucks by hand in her little girl's dress until she was so worn out with eye-strain and fatigue that she slapped this child for unintentionally overturning a vase of flowers! In these enlightened days, of course, few of us slap our children to relieve our own nervous tension, but do we not allow ourselves to become so tired and harried by life that we are almost constantly out of sympathy with, for instance, the natural instinct of children for incessant activity? Are we not always telling our children to " keep still " or " do be quiet " or not to " litter up the house so " or " don't do that " simply because their blessedly healthful busyness with its consequent noise is the last straw for our overstrained nerves? For all this there is no possible excuse. When we undertake the care of children we bind ourselves (no matter what other activities may suffer) not to allow our nerves to become overstrained. We must not be irritable or unjust or unintelligent not even once. We must keep ourselves in a general condition of clear-headed sanity and sound nervous health, which enables us, for instance, to distinguish rationally between childish acts which are really naughty and those which are merely inconvénient for the adult routine. We must keep well enough and self controlled enough and happy enough ourselves (for our happiness depends ultimately on the state of our own hearts) to set a constant example of sunny acceptance of life, even in the face of the constant minor annoyances which make up the common lot. The very fact that Heaven has granted us children for whose sake to make these efforts towards poise and intelligence is reward enough for any sacrifices we may have to make of our moral laziness and egotism.

Everything else is of less importance for children than the color of the home background. The family can live on oatmeal porridge three times a day, the children can go with holes in their stockings, and with uncombed hair ; the house can be unswept, the beds unmade; the mother can dress in a cheap print wrapper any of the dreadful things we usually think of as " impossible " are infinitely better for the children's moral health and present and future happiness and usefulness than a mother constantly scolding to let off the steam of her bad temper, or repressing unjustly the innocent activities of her children.

Fortunately few of us have to make so decisive and radical a choice as this between over-fatigue and actual slovenliness. But every one of us, if we have children to bring up, and have our wits and con-sciences in good working order, must make some such choice every day. None of us can have everything. When we have only ourselves to choose for, we are responsible only to ourselves if we choose badly and select the trivial, superficial goods of life, such as fashionable clothes, elaborate food, or social excitement, and deny ourselves the greater goods, such as peace of mind, intellectual growth, content of heart, and leisure to savor the sweetness of life. But when we have childen, ah, then we are responsible for our choice to God, to society, and to our own souls ! We must not, we dare not, choose badly. First of all, we must have the essentials to feed our children's hearts and minds, and then, when these are provided for, we may be permitted to spend whatever superfluous strength, money, and time we have on embroidering their petticoats and trimming their caps. Before the children come into our lives we may, at no more cost than the sacrifice of our own characters and happiness, indulge ourselves in pulling and hauling with our husbands over minor differences of opinion, in snappish replies to remarks that seem irritating at the end of a hard day's work, in fits of bilious gloom over poverty, hard work, or (more likely) over nothing at all; in bitter exasperation at the perversity of inanimate objects, in vexation over the annoying personal peculiarities of the adult members of the household, in repining at the necessity for doing useful work. But when children live with us all this must stop, or we shall be guilty of perhaps the worst crime possible of poisoning a child's life. Adjusting oneself to the equal partnership of marriage is difficult enough, but to bring up children is to assume the awful responsibility of an absolute ruler, upon the sagacity of whose edicts depend the success and happiness of the dearest objects of his affection.

It is hard to stop these bad habits, it is hard, like everything else that is worth doing, but it must be done. It is also difficult to provide absolutely clean milk for babies, and yet society is more and more passionately setting itself at this task. Perhaps the moral problem may be simplified if we borrow for it some of the rational habits of thought which modern hygiene is teaching us about physical health. Nowadays, when we wake up in the morning with a bad taste in our mouths and no appetite for a wholesome breakfast, we do not complain that it is an inscrutable sending of Providence or an inevitable result of our unsatisfactory or unhappy lives. The fact that some other people are more fortunate than we, we know perfectly well, has nothing whatever to do with the matter. We know that it is caused by indulgence in something indigestible the day be-fore or by eating when too fatigued or by being angry after the meal. Similarly when we hear our-selves replying in an aggrieved tone to an unfortunate but well-meant remark by a fellow-inmate of the house or feeling a disinclination to do our share of the day's necessary routine, when we find our-selves showing bad temper over a mishap due to some child's unintentional mistake, when we reprove a son or daughter in an angry voice or see that we are disseminating an atmosphere of dreary gloom over the household, we ought to ask ourselves just as definitely, as in the case of physical indigestion, what imprudent indulgences we have been allowing to upset our moral health, what is wrong with our moral way of life, in short. It is ignoble to creep behind the self pitying excuse of a life so hard that we cannot keep good-natured and clear-headed under its burdens. Who makes it hard? Do we not ourselves make it hard by straining so fiercely after the various trimmings of life that we are too tired to enjoy the radiant, satisfying, easily gained essentials?

What are the homes where children love to visit? The grand ones, full of servants and idleness, and exquisite breakable bric-à-brac, and elaborate toys, where everyone is dressed finely from morning to night, and where no one must be boisterous and nothing can be touched? Any healthy child would, if the chance were given him, run with all his might from a home of that sort to a low-ceilinged farm-house, full of plain, hardworking, good-natured people, busy with interesting undertakings, but not too busy to allow a child to " look on " or even help. And yet, consciously or unconsciously, the model on which we are endeavoring to form our own homes is the first and not the second of these types. As much as our resources will allow us, we try to make our homes resemble the " grand home."

Let us understand honestly the reason for this tendency of our endeavor. Let us without illusion face the fact that when we drain our pocketbooks and exhaust our nervous strength to supply our children with good clothes and elaborate desserts and well-furnished houses, we are forcing on them not what is good for them or what they in any way need, but what our own moral cowardice needs to protect us against our neighbor's opinion of us. Other people's children have patent-leather shoes, and so must ours, though we lie awake nights worrying over the smallness of our income, and because of those sleepless hours snap at the children's questions next morning.

It is easy to assent to an elevated generality, but hard to stick to one's principles among the details of daily life. The best possible prop to a good resolution is a full, clear statement of what it means to the maker in detailed practice. Every family, and especially every child in the country, would be hap-pier and healthier if the house-mother would hang up over her work table, and read every morning some such confession of faith as this:

" I OWE A DEBT TO MY CHILDREN. Having brought them into the world, their father and I owe it to them to furnish them a happy, free life of physical health, cheerful industry, intellectual growth, and moral dignity and sanity. To pay my part of this debt I have at my command a certain amount of money, physical strength, intellectual vigor, nervous energy, and spiritual force. If I am to keep my honor untarnished I must, as every honest debtor does, use my resources first of all to keep up the payments on my debt."