Parenting - The Old Authority Ineffective

( Originally Published 1914 )

THERE are several dangers which beset anyone trying to obtain this new form of obedience from children. One is the too sanguine tendency of people who try new methods to expect too much, and to be correspondingly cast down by those occasional failures which strew the path of all human enter-prises. No one need expect children to act like clockwork under any system of training, first be-cause they are not clocks, but human beings, and secondly because there is nobody to apply systems but other human beings. And when two sets of fallible human beings come together there are bound to be clashes, no matter how ideal in theory may be the conception of their lives. Just as it is well to remind ourselves frequently that children are not little fierce wild animals to be tamed as tigers and hyenas are kept in subjection, so it is well to be careful lest we go to the other extreme in reaction and forget that they are subject to the same inherited bad tendencies, passions, and desires which cloud our own lives, and against which we must rise each day to do fresh battle. We modems do, it is true, think that a considerable amount of the traditional " naughtiness " of children comes from bad adjustments of their lives to their needs, and that if their surroundings were better planned there would be vastly less than the traditional friction between child and adult. But as to the need of some method of control for our children we have no more doubts than our great-grandparents, nor have we any more illusions than they about the stuff of which children are compounded. Are they not ours? How should they be perfect, even under the best surroundings we can give them?

But we later comers live in an age which has lost its faith in the ability of autocratic authority to do more than control the physical life of men, and we recognize that it is not merely the physical life of children which needs control. We differ from our great-grandparents in seeing, as they did not, the fallacy of trying to teach children to master their own defects by teaching them to allow us to master them entire. All that we hope to do is to teach them to run their own lives, not to teach them to allow us to run their lives for them. If we could only keep clearly in mind the great, the enormous, the radical difference between those two aims we could face more bravely than we do the ridicule which we must inevitably encounter from people not in sympathy with us, and the more formidable occasional times when we do not seem to be succeeding in achieving any aim at all, when we seem to ourselves to have abandoned the old and not to have attained the new.

When an autocratic old great-uncle is visiting you and the children choose that particular time to take an unfair advantage of the rational character of their discipline and " stand and argue," as the exasperated phrase runs, with disingenuous attempts to confuse the issue, it is hard to keep one's head clear through the assault made upon one's vanity by the uncle's "I've no patience with your silly new ways of coddling children. If that were my child he'd mind me the minute I spoke or I'd know the reason why," even though we know that blustering statement to be no argument at all against the validity of our ideas. But there are other moments of real honest doubt of one's own wisdom, such as at-tack, I suppose, everyone not a fanatic, when the old method of imposing authority from the outside and suppressing the child's will by force seems a delightfully simple undertaking, compared to our method of teaching the child to master and direct his own will. Those are the moments against whose insidious attacks we may well defend ourselves by a few plain considerations of facts. How, after all, did the old system work? We have all seen it applied. Let us look at the spectacle with fresh eyes, forgetting the familiarity with it which dulls our vision of it. A very few honest recollections will serve to convince us that the delightful simplicity of imposing the adult will on the child's consists chiefly in the rosy haze which retrospect always casts over institutions of the past. The fact is, that while it is easy enough for a vigorous adult with a strong will to impose it bodily upon a little child, as the child grows in strength and determination himself, this feat becomes harder and harder to accomplish. The old way out of this difficulty bore the ominous and sinister title of " breaking the child's will " and consisted in taming him as animals are tamed, by subjecting him to such violent torture of some sort that the impression of it was for all his life stamped upon his imagination. This was supposed to act as a deterrent to the free exercise of his will, even after the growth of the child had rendered impossible the actual recurrence of the pain. It had, as a matter of fact, almost invariably two results. In the case of strong characters, with the arrival of strength to equal the parents', there was a fierce reaction into in-subordination for the sake of insubordination, which was luridly colored by a more or less conscious desire for revenge for the years of enforced submission. In the case of weak characters the effect was permanent, the will was really " broken," the mainspring of actions never operated freely, even after maturity was reached, and there were to be observed those curious phenomena of immaturity in adult years, which all of us have occasionally seen, still lingering on into our own days, the forty-year-old daughters who never wrote a letter without getting the approval of their mothers upon it or who never decided for themselves what hat to wear.

The truth is that, even when all conditions of surrounding society and public opinion were favorable, the old régime did not work well. There may be "scenes " connected with the most honest efforts to make children grasp the reasons for enlightened action, but will anyone claim that there were no scenes connected with the effort to make them yield without understanding the reasons for yielding? And to any impartial observer can there be any doubt as to which variety of scene is the least painful and has in it most promise for the future of the child? Under the strictest regime of autocratic authority, in the days when autocratic authority was not discredited by society at large, there was no escape from, many days of turbulence and bad feeling, many dreadful scenes of violence, many moments when " discipline " degenerated into a disgraceful hand-to-hand struggle for personal supremacy, many humiliating and embittering recollections stamped upon the child's mind, many times when the child experienced nothing but the suffocating, poisoning emotion of hatred and anger no, our great-grandparents reclined upon no bed of roses while they en-forced their ideal of obedience upon their children.

And if that was true in the time when the autocratic parent had the fullest sympathy of his con-temporaries, the moral support of the opinion of his community back of him, and a fixed mental habit of his own, how much truer is it of modern parents, if in our modern life we try to cling to ancestral ideals of family relations. For no one observing the upheaval of old-established traditions of family life at present can have any illusions that the present system, whatever it is, is working very satisfactorily. Modern parents are attempting to occupy two stools at once, with the inevitable ensuing loss of equilibrium. We say to a child, " You must mind me because I will tell you what is best to do," but if by any chance the child is able to point out something better to do or even just as good, we do not at all rejoice over this evidence of his increasing capacity to grasp the essentials of a situation. We are alarmed at the use of his brain about his own problems, and shifting our weight hastily back to the half-deserted stool of arbitrary authority, we say : " The real point is, however, my child, not that you do what is right, but that you mind me." And there ensues inevitably a certain lack of poise in the relations between children and their parents.

The only way to keep going with the system of " Do it because Mother says so " is never for an instant to allow the play of reason about what Mother says. Arbitrary authority is in its every embodiment to be accepted absolutely whole or it is refused outright. If but a single stone is removed from that imposing-looking edifice it collapses at once into a heap of rubbish. But in these days it is hard and increasingly harder to shut off the play of reason about anything. We wish our children taught to reason in school and we wish, of course, to have them reasoning beings when they are grown up, since other-wise, unless they become monks or soldiers, there is very little place in the modern world for them. But we try to shut them off from reasoning about the one force which is ever present in their childish lives, the " reason why Mother says so." On that large blind spot we insist, always with the idea that somehow we are safeguarding the children. The particular futility of this idea lies in the fact that we insist vainly. It is an ideal that nowadays is never reached —if, indeed, it ever was. All that we accomplish is that the children shall pretend to a blind spot where in reality they see very clearly. Living in modern America, we cannot color the moral atmosphere about our children with the tradition of sub-mission to personal authority any more than we could color the sunshine which pours upon a ten-acre lot by holding up a bit of blue glass. The very foundation of all our American institutions, the very air we breathe, is compounded equally of a fixed belief that everyone can, on the whole, run his life better than anyone else can run it for him, and of an in-tense reaction from the habit of reliance upon external authority. Let us not forget that this heady air of self-dependence is breathed by our children from the day of their birth. Whatever anyone may think about our American form of government, no one can say that it trains us to submit consciously to personal authority. In fact, it trains us so thoroughly not to lean on the authority of anyone, and engenders in us so violently the feeling of responsibility for our own actions, that many foreign lovers of conventionality and old traditions find us a most unpleasant and disconcerting nation. We admit that all the manifestations of the spirit of personal independence are not lovely, but there are few of us who would not fight for the right to continue living in this breezy moral atmosphere. We breathe it in freely, we are not in the least afraid of it for ourselves, and precisely because of our deep confidence in its rightness we make, as a rule, a very poor job out of governing our children according to a régime which we would not for a moment accept ourselves. Those foreign critics have some-thing on their side when they say that as a general. thing the American child does not obey. It is true that we often have not the moral hardihood to insist that they obey an authority which we utterly cast out from our own lives. We twentieth-century people know well enough in our heart of hearts that to do anything solely " because Mother says so " is to perform an unreasonable act, and that every time a child who has attained any capacity to reason yields thus to what is made to appear to him as solely the will of another a constrictive bandage about his reason has been tightened, and the possibility for healthy growth has been lessened. But we are not willing, often we do not dare, to throw overboard this antiquated formula of "Do it because Father says you must" because we do not see any other to take its place. And yet, because our faith in it is not whole-hearted, we are often inconsistent and halting in its application. It is true, as we are often told, that on the subject of obedience we are generally lacking in steadiness and that very often our self-willed children solve the problem for us by simply doing as they please. So true is this that as I have been elaborating in the preceding pages my protests against the doctrine of autocratic authority, I have heard a chorus of American parents crying out : " Ours an autocratic authority ! We have no authority over our children! Do you exhort us not to repress our children? We cannot repress them enough to keep them out of harm's way ! Public opinion, our own self-respect, no longer allows us to beat them into temporary submissiveness and as a result we have no submission from them."

It seems to me that what is needed is a thorough-going revision of our innermost convictions on the matter, for, after all, it is innermost convictions which rule the world. " If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible unto you." We uneasy, troubled, modern parents are in an ambiguous situation. Modern .thought beats upon us so insistently that, whether we acknowledge it or not, in the heart of every one of us lurks a doubt as to our real right to obtain the old variety of submissiveness from the children. This is shown by the complete abandonment of the more severe of the old methods of obtaining it. We do not believe in it enough to beat and starve the children into it, as conscientious parents used to, and yet we are in a panic at the idea of really turning our backs upon it. Added to this suspicion as to the rights of our position is the additional difficulty that even if we wholly believed in it, we would almost certainly fail in imposing it upon modern children. We couldn't if we would, and we are not at all sure that we would if we could. It is not surprising that our position lacks coherence, and that, wasting our strength in clinging feebly to the old authority which is being wrested away from us, we do not succeed in establishing very much of any sort of authority in the lives of our children. We are in that fatal position of not having the courage of our convictions. We feel that the responsibility for the care of the children is a tremendous, almost a crushing one, and we need to brace us some correspondingly tremendous belief, which is supplied (if we will but wholeheartedly embrace it) by the belief in our desire to do whatever is best for them. But we insist upon mixing with that noble desire a hankering after personal dignity, which has nothing to do with anything, and a faint-hearted fear that an abstract principle, even the noblest, is, after all, a very weak weapon with which to face life ; whereas human experience shows it to be far the strongest weapon anyone can have, against which mere force is powerless. We are not quite willing, and we do not quite dare, to renounce as we do the devil and all his works, the idea that the children ought to submit themselves to us, and not through us, to the principles of righteousness and order. The difference between these two attitudes does not seem as deeply-cutting as it is. It is only in moments of rare insight that we see that the two attitudes are diametrically opposed to each other. In our ordinary, slipshod, hasty, everyday thinking the difference seems rather a theoretical one, to argue about rather than to live by, to read in a book rather than to apply when little Eleanor wants an extra piece of cake after dinner. And yet it is only when one's inner life is coherent that one's outer life is secure from inconsistencies. Is it not possible that in a thorough mastery of that fundamental difference between obedience to a personal command and obedience to an eternal law lies our only chance to attain consistency, validity, and, as far as that goes, even dignity in our authority over our modern children?

It was not easy for our great-grandmothers to control the children by whipping them. If they were made of sturdy stuff they hovered as near the edge of rebellion as they dared and stepped over as frequently as conditions removed the actual presence of the restraining authority. It is not easy for us to control the children by trying to make them exercise their reason and their instinctive feeling for the difference between right and wrong. But every time we do succeed we have done something worth doing. At the very worst, we are having no harder a time to maintain our ideas than did our forebears (consult any really candid old man or any honest old novel on the subject of the clockwork behavior of children under the rule of autocracy) and we have the satisfaction of knowing that our efforts are directed towards a permanent, enlightened, and elevated achievement.