Parenting - Discarding The Pretense Of Omniscience

( Originally Published 1914 )

IN addition to the use of insight, we can strengthen that bridge in another manner by discarding from among our building material the old, half-rotten plank of omniscience, which looks so imposing to the parental eye, but which always breaks in two under the foot of the unwary person who trusts in it as a means of keeping in touch with children after they are out of their very early years. It is not easy to discard. Nothing is sweeter than to lose for a time the sense of our erring humanity and to see the trusting eyes of the five- and six- and seven-year-olds looking up at us as we look up to divine strength and goodness. But we are inexorably punished if we attempt to force this perilous pleasure an instant beyond its natural duration into the life of the ten- and eleven-and fourteen-year-old. In the first place, such en-forced prolongation (if it is successful) has for fastidious moral palates a slightly sickly and unwholesome taste; and furthermore (if the children are worth anything), we pay for it the heavy price of a later sure and inevitable violent reaction into a blighting and wholesale skepticism of all parental wisdom or fairness. The transitory belief in the all-wisdom and all-goodness of the parents should be replaced in the child's mind by the other fortifying and permanent sight of them as only trying, like himself, to do the best they can in the midst of very complicated problems. The first idea should, at the right moment, drop from the child's mind painlessly as the leaf falls from the tree on a windless autumn afternoon, leaving no scar behind it.

It can disappear thus, however, only if the parents have kept their own integrity rigorously free from suspicion and have never, not even once, initiated the child into the sinister meaning of the verb " to bluff." It is only the half-educated teacher who never dares admit ignorance on a given point, and they are parents morally under par who never dare admit that they have been wrong. Being human they frequently are wrong ; and their children, having keen eyes for reality, know it very well. They might as well again try to extract some profit from a hard necessity and apply to themselves the same honest scalpel of analysis on which (if they are en-lightened) they rely so much to attain fairness in their treatment of the children. It is admitted that to understand a situation goes a long way towards mastering it. Why should we refuse the children this aid to a mastery of their problem? In the attempt to regulate rationally and fairly our personal relations, there is nothing which helps us so much as a clear idea of just what motives are in action, why people act as they do. We try our best to keep this idea clear in our own heads. Why should we befog it in the case of the children? Why should a little " mea culpa " like the following addressed to a boy old enough to reason be considered as such lèse-majesté against the might, majesty, and dignity of parenthood? " See here, Billy, when I was so provoked at you yesterday for upsetting the jardinière and breaking the pot, it was partly because I was awfully tired and nervous from having been up the night before with the baby. Suppose we both of us try to be more careful after this. You try not to thrash around so wildly in the house and I'll try to remember not to be so hard on you about something you didn't really intend to do." This seems to me a quite ordinary attempt towards decent fairness in one's relation with the child, but if I ever advance some such simple idea in conversation with other mothers I am treated as a traitor to the parental caste. They cry out upon me : " Why, if you admit that your whole authority is gone ! How is the child to know that the next time you reprove him for a really naughty action it may not be simply because you are tired and nervous again? "

He knows, it seems to me, as we all know the ins and outs of the people we live with, by the exercise of ordinary good sense, and it will be found that children are by no means behind adults in the ac-curacy with which they read the characters of those about them. By the time he has had seven or eight years of constant living with his mother, Willie knows, whether she admits it or not, that his reproof came largely from nerves, and that his punishment was too severe for an unintentional offense. The only question is whether he is to be brought to a conviction of the entire probity of his mother's character or not.

That is, after all, the one big pivot on which the whole question turns. Emerson says of social reforms and reformers: " It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses. Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things about him." He might have been writing of that smaller model of society, the family. The very latest methods in education, the dernier cri of modernity about the relation of parent to child, will benefit those relations not at all, if the parent himself be not renovated. Of course, the delicate, the awkward, the difficult part of his position is the fact that he is taken, so to speak, unawares. He cannot wait until he has perfected his character (as if anyone ever did that) before he undertakes the training and care of his children. He must deal with them while he is still wrestling with many childish weaknesses in his own heart. Whatever renovation is done must go on under the very observant eye of childhood. But could there be a better spectacle, after all, for the very observant eye of childhood? Could there be an example more calculated to encourage imitation? It is true that if his mother confesses to Willie that she scolded him largely to relieve her own nerves, Willie's mind will thenceforth be open to the conception that she may do it again, but as far as that is concerned Willie's mind will not forever stay shut to the conception, whether she confesses it or not. And I think she need not fear the corroding effect of this revelation of a small weakness on her part, if at the same time Willie's mind is opened to the saving idea that his mother's desire is to do the fair thing, rather than to save her face. If he is convinced of that, their relations are on bedrock. If not, his mother's influence in his life will be more and more in the nature of an irritant, resisted in the measure of his increasing strength, and will finally fade away to nothing more than the arid desire to " do his duty by Mother," because it is his duty and must be done. Our rationalistic world has argued out of existence the old inviolable rightness of parental acts, which', like the old regal dignity, was like a magic charm that yielded before the first questioning voice. It was said of Louis XIV that he had so ingrained a certainty of his own divinity that he succeeded in impressing the crowd of courtiers in his bedchamber with the conviction that when he did it the act of taking off a nightcap in the morning was an essentially kingly performance. But no king of a later date than Louis has been able to find a crowd of courtiers who would swallow that pretension. And few modern children who have begun to reason at all can be made to think that an unjust act, because Mother has done it, is therefore a righteous one, or that a snap-judgment, based on a muddle-headed misunderstanding of the factors involved, is a good solution to a difficulty because Father has set his foot down that it must be thus. They have so little experience with other adults, they are forced by the nature of the family life to fix their remarkably keen eyes with such concentration on their parents that they early come to have a penetrating knowledge of the sort of thing (whether vital or petty) which causes Father to set his foot down, and which moves Mother to take one side or the other in a perplexity. And they are quite aware whether the usual mental attitude of the family towards an undecided question is one of openness, reasonableness, and fair-minded receptivity to all legitimate arguments and to all the information which can be secured, or whether, when a vexed question comes up, the family habit is to enter upon a vociferous period of heated presentation of pet prejudices, one set of which settles down into resentment at the victory of the other side. Of course, they do not at all times of their development do full justice to the motives of those in authority over them. Their ardent desire to have what they want often makes them on some one special occasion resent bitterly the most righteous judgment, based on the most enlightened reason. They go through many phases like the rest of us. But the sum total of their knowledge is of an accuracy quite astonishing. In fact, it is exactly the accuracy of their knowledge of their parents which is the cause of a wonderfully sweet and mitigating aspect of the family relation. Contrasted to the occasionally en-countered deep-lying hostility between grown-up child and parent, which, as we have noted as existing in some cases in spite of our sentimental attempt to mask that fact, everyone must have known cases of a curious, nameless, apparently causeless affection between adult children and their parents, who to all outward appearance have absolutely nothing in common. It is customary to refer this to some mysterious blood-tie, but it is more likely that it is another result of the terribly searching knowledge of those within the family circle. It is not, thank Heaven, only unsuspected weaknesses and vices which are discovered in the unsparing light ; and the grudging tolerance which suddenly at a crisis flares up into a surprising heat of affection comes from one of the most consolatory facts that can be learned about human nature, namely, that people may not only be very different from us and very irritating to us, but can be positively weak, erring, and wrong, and still possess precious virtues and most endearing qualities. One reason for holding with all our might to the much attacked institution of the home and family is that in no other school can this austerely comforting lesson be so forced upon the most recalcitrant minds ; and that out of the family circle it is only the rarest spirits which ever attain that half-divine in-sight, going deeper than conscious reason, and resulting in a love which frees us from bitterness of spirit with the faults of others.

One of the most calming and sobering influences in my own childhood was the quaint mannerism of my godfather, who was wont, when appeal was made to him, to lay aside his book, hitch his eyeglasses to a little hook on his waistcoat, lean back in his chair, put the tips of his fingers together with a judicial air, and slowly and seriously pronounce a never varying formula : " Well now let us consider this question" The phrase was like oil on the troubled waters of controversy. Out of the steam and fog of our intense personal preferences rose up the Gibraltar-like outline of the real merits of the case. Hypnotically our young minds accepted his own attention to the true proportions of things. We abandoned, scarcely conscious of what we did, our first intentions to confuse the issue by outcries and passion, special pleading and appeals to well known weak sides of the authorities. We stated our case, sometimes unexpectedly shrunk away to nothing in this clear white light, sometimes unexpectedly stronger than we thought. Our remarks were given grave consideration and an answer returned which always began : " Well, I'm going to tell you the reasons I see against your having your own way. If you can show me they don't exist or aren't very important, you can have your own way. If not, of course you'll have to give it up."

We were put on our mettle by that " of course,"

which took for granted our acceptance of a reasoning being's point of view. And whether in the end we had or had not our own way, we left that lucid presence with a clearer understanding of civilized methods of procedure. No matter what it was, our proposition had received genuine consideration.

And now that we are no longer young, more than one of us confess to feeling ourselves steadied and braced in a moment of heat or vexation by the echo in our ear of that quiet voice, with its appeal to eternal standards of reason and fairness: " Well now let us consider this proposition."

One of the solemn and daunting factors in the problem of home-life is the irrevocable accuracy of the childish memory, which registers with impartial vividness whatever good and whatever bad are en-countered. Upon it for all their lifetime is stamped the recollection of a system founded on reason and justice and honesty or that other system which, con-fronted with a difficult situation in child-life, foams over into a lather of peremptory commands. Like the rest of us, they are often not consciously aware of what goes on in their heads, and they may spend years under a régime of affectionate tyranny or mismanagement parading as " mother-love " without openly revolting from it. But somewhere in their subconsciousness there is hung a true balance, into the one or the other scale of which goes every act, every decision, every revelation of character made by those about them. When the time of trial comes, when there is an important question to be decided or a cross-roads in morality is reached, the balance tips once for all. And then we so often have the spectacle, astonishing, touching, tragic, of the adolescent at a crisis turning with apparent cruelty and ingratitude away from the hearts which have loved him so dearly, and which yearn over him so fondly now.

Every minister, every college professor, every per-son at all in the public eye as a teacher or mentor, has had the strange experience of being suddenly asked by a young person, almost a stranger, for ad-vice about some terribly momentous personal question, and has encountered over and over again the same passionate unwillingness to return to the family circle for counsel. The very phrases that are used grow wretchedly familiar " Oh, no, I wouldn't speak to my father about it for anything! Mother wouldn't understand! I never talk to my parents about such things." Armed with the old fallacy that to give a name to a thing is to explain it, we have disposed of such phenomena by saying: " It is often easier to speak to strangers about intimate things than to somebody you know." That is true. The question that should fill parents with a passion of self-questioning is, why it is true. The adolescent cannot tell you why. He does not know why. He is only acting with a sure instinct on the knowledge accumulated during years of observation. He is quite unable to analyze the violence of his reaction from parental influence ; and he often unwisely turns from a parent to someone quite as faulty. He needs something which he does not possess, and he turns instinctively to where he can find it or where he thinks he can find it: he does not turn to where he is convinced he cannot find it. Because of his youth, the blatant newness of his self-confidence is undermined at crucial moments by a sick self-distrust. For all his sureness of his own wisdom he knows that he is in-experienced in life ; when it comes to an important point he doubts his own ability to decide a vexed question with fairness, with impartiality, with a grasp on all the elements involved. Have his experiences at home taught him to expect his parents to decide questions on the ground of fairness and impartiality, and is he accustomed to see them ex-amine a situation open-mindedly before pronouncing judgment? If so, he will not be one of those pathetic young people who lay bare to strangers the secrets of their hearts ; nor will he shut himself up in a bitter, misanthropical distrust of all humanity. But if he feels instinctively that Mother will not even wait to hear the case stated in full, but will decide hastily on one superficial point which chances to offend her taste ; if he knows that because the problem touches upon one of Father's deep-rooted personal prejudices, it will not have a fair hearing; if he knows that he must wait until they are both in " just the right mood" to expect a reasonable consideration; if he feels that they will not do justice to his newly-grown ability and desire to cope with responsibility himself, but will think of him as the child he recently was, one of two things will happen. He will either wrestle with his problem alone and unobserved, with no help from riper judgment than his own, or he will be an-other boy who makes people talk about the " hard egotism of the young in turning away indifferently from their parents."

The truth is that while his parents are lamenting his desertion he is casting desperately about to find a father and mother. The fact of having passed eighteen birthdays, or twenty-one, or even thirty, does not free a human being from the instinct to lean on tried wisdom and strength the child's instinct, the human instinct. The grown man, struggling with terribly vital problems, often feels the need more acutely than in his self-confident earlier years. But it must be real strength and real wisdom, if it is to be suited to his needs. The old sort of coddling and petting " mothering " is not a staff on which to lean except in moments of relaxation, when no staff is really needed. No matter how fast he may have grown, his parents had the start of him, and if they have not stopped growing, they will have amassed more unembittered knowledge of the world, more confidence in the better elements of life, more philosophy, more calm than he. " If they have not stopped growing." That is a pregnant " if," on which the matter turns. So many times the tragedy comes because besotted parents, with a misguided passion for service, have so lavished themselves on the child's lesser needs that they have stunted their own individualities, have not developed and ripened as they might, and so are pitifully inadequate to the spiritual needs of the child in maturity, to gain whose confidence they would give their lives. For though the affection of a mother, unwavering, unaffected by change or adversity, is almost as great a thing as even sentimental poets would have us think, it is a mere palliative of human perplexities, not a genuine help unless it is supported by the weight of an individuality commanding real respect. And the manifestations of even the deep-rooted maternal love, if unguided by a clear head and a ripe judgment, are apt to be childishly, occasionally grotesquely unsuitable as helps to grown human beings in the press of the hard battle with life. A man can hire someone to mend his socks for him, to remember his little whimsies of taste, and to sit up o' nights for him; but he is destitute indeed if he must turn away to untried strangers in the hope of finding what is more necessary to him than food, the belief in sanity, insight, and justice. He needs that belief desperately, if he is not to suffer moral shipwreck, so desperately that unless he is made of stern stuff, he can-not endure living without it, and violates every deeply-ingrained instinct for reticence about sacred matters by applying for it to a casual passerby. The young girls who tearfully waylay their favorite instructor in college, to ask her advice on an affair of which she can know nothing; the young men who wait with set faces in the twilight of a clergyman's study to lay before him a case of conscience which could only be decided by someone with a complete knowledge of the circumstances, what are they but living symbols of the immense need for fatherhood and motherhood?