Parenting - The Use Of Insight

( Originally Published 1914 )

VERY well then, here we are, chastened and subdued as befits parents at this stage of the world's history, at last with a clear idea of our own limitations and with a vividly imagined goal before us. We have seen that we are the children's physical parents only so long as they are physically children, and if we are to continue to be useful and welcome factors in their lives, it will be only because we have succeeded in substituting for that quite impermanent tie the strong and lasting one of a spiritual bond ; and we have seen that to try to use physical repression of any sort as a means to that end is worse than useless.

And yet to go to the other extreme and abandon all attempt at any sort of influence over the children is as fatal to our purpose of growing into a permanent and valuable relationship with them. The least observation of family life about us will deter us from contemplating the adoption of that short-cut method of child-training which in older days was frankly and picturesquely called " spoiling the children," and which still exists masked under various fine new names like " Nietzscheism," the " development of the superman," or " the right of the ego to expand without limitations." Nobody who has ever encountered a child who has undergone this system of " hands off " has any illusions about the sort of child produced by the simple method of letting him do what he wishes at all times. We are modern ; we believe (at least we are beginning to believe) in the right of each individuality to develop as freely as possible without interfering with the rights of others, but a spoiled child is a spoiled child, no matter what he is called. There is notoriously no hope for anyone, let alone their parents, to keep in close touch with people who have had all their whims gratified.

We are forced to see, therefore, that we cannot adopt abdication, that traditional alternative to tyranny. We cannot make " the great refusal" and expect to come off with the least credit. We must neither repress the individuality of our children nor let it run wild. Those are the conditions of our undertaking. The question now is one of ways and means. How shall we, confronted with myriad-headed reality, set about our great enterprise?

Well, to begin with, we can mentally remove our-selves for a while from our usual intense personal interest in that fascinating and exciting drama called domestic life, and look at it critically from a little distance, as an intelligent stage-manager goes up into the top gallery to see if the mass grouping of his actors is correct. If we discover (as we nearly always do) that physical and material matters are usurping the center of the stage, instead of occupying the modest minor position in the wings which really belongs to them, we can rush again to the stage and endeavor to rearrange matters more reasonably. It is a never-ending struggle, and it seems like a new one every day, because we are dealing, in children, with organisms endowed with an immense capacity for rapid growth. In the case of the little child our tendency is to spend so much of our time and his in making sure that his hands and face are clean, that he, remembers to shake hands with the visiting lady, that he puts on his rubbers when it rains, that he does not talk too much in the presence of adults, that he brushes his teeth, and goes to bed regularly at early hours, and obeys his elders ; that we seldom have the intellectual leisure to recognize what a romantic figure the child is, a traveler in a strange and wonderful country, taking in through every flexible new sense a thousand fresh impressions of the great adventure of life, and formulating more and more clearly with every day's advance into the new country what shall be his attitude towards it?

Now, it is undoubtedly very necessary for him to learn to keep his face and hands clean, to eat with his fork, to chew his food thoroughly, to sit squarely on his chair, etc. Indeed, it is so necessary that until very recently all but a few sentimentalists thought that no more could be asked of a little child, and that all his energies should be uniquely directed to these matters. We no longer believe this theoretically. Although daily life is apparently made up of such small details, we see that if we limit our relations with a child mainly to the matter of rubbers, clean faces and hands, presentable manners, we not only do our best to stunt and narrow his own life, but we cut ourselves off from him as soon (and it will be very soon) as he is a grown-man and quite able to wash his own face and hands, and put on his own rubbers. But it is hard to live up to our new ideas, and because the pressingly tangible, ever-present material matters are only to be kept in their places by a never-ending struggle, and it is hard to keep struggling. So we tend to allow them to occupy all of our life with the child, we give them first place in the hours we spend with the children; and other matters, like the growth in them of a rational and enlightened attitude towards the universe, are given what time and energy are left over after making sure that the boys remember to take off their hats in the house, and the girls to say " Excuse me ! " when they pass in front of an adult. The bigger, immaterial, epoch-making incidents of their lives are unnoticed, unheeded, and often unwittingly repressed, in the clatter created by our impassioned desire that they shall wash behind their ears.

I remember hearing an old lady who was usually considered " queer " say to an aunt of mine, noted for the excellent " discipline " of her children: " Elizabeth, if one of your children should start to tell you that he had just received a gold medal for bravery, I do believe that you would stop him to say: 'Charley, how many times have I told you not to talk when your mouth is full? Wait till you have chewed up your food and swallowed it, and then you may speak.' " And I remember my aunt's sticking stanchly to the ideals of her generation with her re-ply : " I certainly should, and I ought to." She at least was consistent. Our more modern attitude is not. We believe firmly that the child has a deeper and higher life, as much as we (and occasionally more). We acknowledge that it should have first place, and that minor matters should always come after. Theoretically we recognize the great truth that moments of spiritual and intellectual insight come as they list, and not when it is most convenient for us; that they are too precious to subordinate to any other considerations, and that if we always de-lay in welcoming them until clean finger nails have been assured, we are very apt to lose them forever. Sitting quietly at ease, meditating on these great matters, we have the clearest ideas as to the right proportions to be kept, but when the actual child presents himself to us, inopportune, grimy, ungrammatical, brusque, filled with the holy desire to confess a fault without delay, we are very apt (ah, how much more apt if public opinion in the shape of an observant neighbor is present) to cut short the first faltering words of his confession by a " You mustn't break in on older people when they are talking, dear. And don't say ' We wasn't,' but ' We weren't.' And I think you can't have noticed that Mr. Blank is here. Go and shake hands with him, and say: ' Excuse me for interrupting.' " Perhaps an archangel could go on and lay bare his heart after an introduction like that, but no human being can.

And that other comic story, at which we have all laughed, the boy who said if he should meet his mother in heaven, he knew her first words would be: " Jimmie Clark, you go right back and wipe the mud off your shoes!" Really, upon close inspection, that story is not so very funny, after all, at least when one is in the class with Jimmie's mother and no longer belongs to Jimmie's contemporaries. It seems to testify that Jimmie's experience of his mother leads him to expect her always to see the minor, superficial details of a situation rather than its real aspect. It testifies that Jimmie's mother, whatever her real convictions may be, has never been able sufficiently to master the mere machinery of life, to let her family know that she has any real convictions. It testifies to a lack of quickness and flexibility of spiritual insight as to the relative importance of small and great matters which is one of the dangerous snags in matrimony; and in parenthood a real submerged reef, responsible for innumerable unnecessary shipwrecks. A hundred familiar anecdotes bear witness to the commonness of its occurrence, and to the foolhardy recklessness with which we are content only to laugh at it. Every family which hands down oral tradition has several in its storehouse of funny stories. In our family we still quote laughingly a great-grandmother who is reported to have said at family prayers one morning: "'Lijah, did you black your shoes as I told you? You finished molding the bread, didn't you, Milly? William, you took that pail of swill out to the pigs? Well, we will now pray the Lord to bless our home."

Practically we nearly always say to the child exactly as my great-grandmother said to the Lord, that we will give him time and strength after all the material necessities and proprieties have been attended to. Practically we insist that we will sympathize with him in the joys and sorrows and wonders of his exciting inner life only after we have taken care that he makes an appearance which will be a credit to us in the eyes of our neighbors. When the miracle of the resurrection bursts upon him with the sight of a butterfly emerging from the cocoon, we will answer his question only after he has remembered to say " Please," and not to shout too loudly. We will share with him his delighted interest in the anthill only after spreading over his enthusiasm a properly wet blanket of reproof about his having forgotten to blow his nose. And we reap the re-ward of other people who put off the greater till the lesser is provided for; we find that when we at last settle ourselves to welcome the greater it has taken wings to itself. Everyone is familiar with the symbolic figure of the man who spends all his life accumulating wealth and finds in the end that he has lost the capacity to enjoy it. But we miss the similar significance of that other familiar figure, the mother whose grown-up children have learned at last to keep their faces admirably clean, to pretend to welcome people whom they do not wish to see, and to take their soup from the spoon without the faintest suspicion of a liquid gurgle, but who have also irrevocably learned the other lesson of finding their sympathy and understanding elsewhere than with their mother. Or else, as is the case in many lives, they have learned the arid lesson of going without sympathy and understanding, or with only fitful experiences of those blessings such as come occasionally through the chance encounter with an inspiring professor in college, who is, in some ways, for a year or so, a spiritual father or mother.

So here is one way in which we can struggle to bridge over the gulf between the generations. In our relations with the children, we can refuse to be tricked by the complexity of life into laying any more stress than is absolutely necessary on the purely material side of things. We can try with all our might to keep a receptive mind and an alert ear for the communications, always rare and elusive and shy, from the immortal souls and creative minds whose earthly habitations distress us so by being dirty and noisy and unkempt in childhood, and in adolescence by decking themselves out in gaudy socks and hair-dressings which offend our taste. We can try with all our might to keep our sense of the proportions of things, to train our children to be clean and mannerly and presentable to the neighbors, and yet instantly to throw all these considerations overboard at any crisis, if they threaten to interfere with the vigor of their intellectual life or with the delicacy of their spiritual perceptions.

I lived in a college town in my childhood, one of the humorous figures of which was the professor of entomology, a tall, gaunt, stooping man, who was as much noted for his lack of social graces as for the remarkable acumen of his mind. He was a bachelor with no family of his own, but, although he used none of that grinning pretense of being a little boy which marks the usual bachelor who wishes to be liked by children, he was deep in the confidence of all the faculty sons and daughters. He never put himself out to be entertaining to children, he was mercilessly cold to any " smart-aleck " attempts to show off, he was often very brusque, and never at all smiling and jolly ; but, although we never " fooled " joyfully with him as we did with other bachelor friends of our fathers, we invariably turned to him with our serious interests, of which we had, like most children, more than our elders believed. At the time I naturally made no attempt to analyze the attraction old Professor Quincy had for us, but in thinking it over since, I have become aware that it came solely from the quickness of his ear in detecting the note of seriousness in us. He used for the children who chanced to touch his life the same trained discrimination between the merely fortuitous and the really significant, which made him so highly successful as a scientist. As a finely-trained musician's ear detects the difference between the banging and strumming of an ordinary child and the crude attempts at real rhythm of the musically gifted child, so Professor Quincy knew in a flash the difference between the idle, trivial chatter and the unreason-able demands such as children incessantly make and the rare moments when the germ of a true intellectual process was being quickened to life. He was by no means tolerantly good-natured towards the chatter or the childishness if it disturbed him, but how sure was a certain little girl of his knowing before she had spoken three words that she was on the track of something of real importance.

I did not happen to see it myself, but I was brought up on the laughing account of his flight early one summer morning, through the streets of the gossipy little community, clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and leading by the hand a little boy in night-drawers. The child was the son of his next door neighbor, and had pattered over to the professor's solitary breakfast-table to show him a beetle, and ask something about its anatomy. Although no-body else would have made much out of the question, it showed, according to Professor Quincy, so intelligent and original a turn of mind that he was electrified, and, leaving his cup of coffee untasted, be sprang to his feet, took the little inquirer straight to the big microscope in the laboratory, and gave him his first lesson in entomology. I am bound to add that the little boy grew up into a physician and not into an entomologist, but the anecdote illustrates at least why all children turned to grim " old Q " when they had something vital on their minds.