Parenting - Obedience As A Transitive Verb

( Originally Published 1914 )

There is nothing more curious or fascinating to a reflective mind than the outward similarity between a wire which is charged with electricity and one which is a mere strip of harmless metal. It is a phenomenon of modern life which impresses the imagination on the same side as that touched by the old idea of magic. There they are, the little copper strands, all looking exactly alike. You can handle them, all but one, as you would sewing thread, but if you touch that one a living force originating miles away leaps tingling through your body.

This phenomenon is reproduced with great accuracy in the world of thought. The tangle of question and problems concerning child-training is tremendous. Nearly everything is being questioned and discussed, and one may walk about freely lifting and handling all sorts of subjects without receiving more than a politely interested attention from conscientious parents. Shall children go to school early or late? How about the kindergarten versus the Montessori school? Shall children wear half-hose in winter or flannel drawers? How shall we answer their difficult questions? How about social life for adolescents? How can we teach the little ones to use their hands? How about nature-study,? When any one of these questions is propounded to the modern parent a genteelly animated discussion is insured. They are, in fact, the subject of many a tea-table talk, proceeding to the clink of spoons in cups, and punctuated by much savored mouthfuls of sandwiches and wafers. Misled by this genial appearance of willingness to consider open-mindedly all questions relating to child-training, I felt the utmost freedom, when I first began writing on the subject, to ramble about among those innumerable problems, noting actual conditions as acutely as I could, reading the best authorities I could find, applying the clearest logic at my command, and dropping upon my conclusions the testing acid of practical experience with real children. Coming in this manner upon the subject labeled "obedience," I gave it the scrutinizing examination one feels necessary before forming a careful opinion on any subject, and did my best to consider the true merits of the case. I was rather surprised at the results of my meditations, and, hoping they might chance to interest some other parents, I wrote them down in the form of the preceding pages of this essay.

Their publication turned an electric current of the highest voltage all through my unsuspecting person. Inadvertently I had laid my hands on a live wire, on the live wire in the relations of parents to children. Professional educators may pull hair as they will over the necessity for educating the motor-sensory powers or for training the capacity for inhibition, and parents will look on at the con-test with a bright, cheerful interest. But let the question of obedience be brought up, even for the most abstract discussion, and we leave our comfort-able spectators' seats and rush into the arena, every man-Jack and woman-Jill of us, the light of battle in our eyes. My mail was immediately swollen with letters from strangers who argued the case heatedly with me. And I was set upon by nearly everyone I met, from all my cousins and remote kin to people who had that instant been presented to me. Not long ago an entire stranger stopped me on the street, made sure who I was, and after having prefaced his remarks with some amiable generalities about reading my articles with interest, said earnestly: "But I do think you are all off on the subject of obedience ! Wet weather or fair weather, that girl ought to have worn her rubbers if her mother said so, whether there was any other reason for it or not. Children should mind their parents or the world will come to an end." And only this very morning, just before I sat down to my desk to work, I had a fresh illustration of how entirely the heat felt on the subject had caused my attitude on the matter to be misunderstood. My four-year-old daughter was protesting vigorously against the morning dash of cold water on her throat and chest, and as I led her along to the bathroom I was saying briskly: " Well, but you know it keeps you from having sore throats and colds, Sally, dear; so come along quickly and let's have it over with." A visiting relative overheard the remark and cried triumphantly, as though catching me in an inconsistency : " Well, I notice your own children mind ! " adding in answer to my " Why, I should hope so ! " " Why should you hope so when you advise other people to the contrary? "

The kernel of the whole matter turns upon the object of that transitive verb, "to obey." What is the child to obey? Is he to continue, as he must in babyhood, obeying the will of another because it is stronger? Or is he little by little to be initiated into the idea that the will of another is to be obeyed only when the commands are righteous?

We are all of one mind, to begin with. Practically all the disputants involved (except a negligible and dwindling minority of fanatical followers of Nietzsche) agree unanimously that the child must obey. No argument is necessary so far. We all move along together over the same road. A little beyond this, however, a by-path forks off and we lose a certain small number of our company, stanch old aristocrats, who have survived the French Revolution of ideas, who are still loyal to the old régime of autocracy, and who, pressed to a clear exposition of their ideas, refuse to base their claims for the obedience of children on any paltering modern notions about the superior wisdom and righteousness of the parents. They claim boldly that children ought to obey be-cause it is right for people to submit themselves to authority without questioning if that authority is good or bad. Authority, they insist, is not, as most moderns believe, a means to an end, but, a positive good in itself, without regard to its purpose; and the sooner children learn to accept this in their relations with their parents, the better for all concerned. Such anachronistic figures are rare and rapidly becoming rarer, and we can safely ignore them, leaving them to voice the theory of the sanctity of unfounded authority, along with those other picturesque relics, the people who believe in the divine right of kings, in the principle of caste, in the degradation connected with working for a living..

But after we have left behind us this quaint Old Guard, valiantly fighting a battle decided a century ago, we are deserted by a slightly larger number of those who find it hard, and indeed unseemly, to reason clearly about anything so sacred to them as the principle of parental authority. They are not in-sensible to the facts of the case. They grant when it is insistently called to their attention that an enormous change of opinion has taken place since the Roman theory that children were the absolute possessions of their father, who held the right of life and death over them. They do not succeed in shutting their eyes to the fact that modern society does not in the least recognize the parents' complete authority over the child, since every civilized society reserves to itself the right to take away a child from people who are not treating it well, even if those people happen to be its very own flesh and blood parents. They concede that all this points unmistakably to a growing conviction in the world that the basis of parental authority is solely the ultimate good of the child and hence of society ; but having been unwillingly conveyed thus far by logic, they refuse utterly any further transportation by that motive force. They refuse to admit that a total change of opinion about the basis of parental authority calls for any change in mental attitude on the part of the parent or on the part of the child, or for any readjustment of the relation between parent and child. And since they refuse to allow any former admission on their part to be made the basis of further argument, it is somewhat difficult to continue talking the matter over with them. As nearly as an outsider can make out, however, their feeling is that it is all very well for parents to admit that their authority arises solely from their capacity to do what is best for the child, but that this abstract proposition is altogether too stimulating a draught for young heads. Their position is the one taken from time immemorial by partisans of a creed which they themselves no longer believe, the position that some creed is necessary, and that the reasonable and believable one which they hold is too good for other people. Their doctrine is that parents should know that their authority rests upon reason, but that if at any given moment their authority and reason should not coincide, reason should not be allowed for an instant to interfere with their authority, lest the children might suspect that their authority is not absolute and arbitrary, but (as it is in fact) based on reason. Since there are few moderns who, if the choice is clearly put to them, quite dare even to appear to prefer authority to reason, we need not stop to argue with that small minority who do, and leaving these augurs solemnly insisting that winking is a necessary part of any religion, we can press for-ward still for all practical purposes a united band.

We are united on the dogma that parents, knowing far better than their children what is good for them, have a right to exact obedience from them on this ground, and we all believe that this eminently sane, enlightened, and just claim should be expounded to the children. In fact, we all do expound it to the children, eulogizing the great extent of our worth to them and taking ourselves as oracles and prophets with a seriousness which only the divine loyalty of very little children can contemplate with a straight face. In angry tones we exhort them to self-control and patience, and, simmering openly with petty irritation, we explain that we hold the right to dictate to them on the ground of our superior virtue. But this is beside the mark. The fact remains that all the company of parental pilgrims who have gone along with us on this journey of inquiry fully believe that there should be a frank avowal that the claim to obedience from children rests on the same basis as the claim to obedience from the citizens of an enlightened State, namely, on considerations of righteousness and the general good of the community. But here let us say an anticipatory farewell to those who have been our companions, for at this point the road takes a sudden turn, rounds a sharp corner, and leads forward into unsuspected regions. Almost without exception the entire band of parents stops short here, utterly refusing to set one foot before the other, even though the road before them is the plain continuation of the one over which they have been treading so firmly. For after telling the child that he must obey his parents because their commands lead him to do what is right, the next step is, of course, to admit that if it happens that he can do what is right without obeying his parents, or if rightness is not in question at all, he is at liberty to obey or not, as he thinks best. From this chilling wind of logic, blowing cheerlessly upon pretensions to parental autocracy, nearly all of us shrink back, covered with the gooseflesh of extreme apprehension. We are willing to allow our children the knowledge of the rational basis for their obedience, but we are terrified at the idea of allowing them ever to act upon that knowledge or, indeed, even to exercise their wits freely in regard to it. Our idea of giving it to them strikingly resembles the idea of the traditional South or Central American dictator in giving the vote to the citizens of his state. They may have it, since it is the modern fashion for citizens to have votes, but they must do nothing with it.

If we are so constituted (as a good many modern people are) that we feel rather ashamed of openly casting away logic as a guide to conduct, we hasten to collect as many reasons as possible which show that this particular logical step, although sound in theory, is dangerous and pernicious in practice. We feel very proud of the cogent look of many of these reasons, and, turning them adroitly till their very best side is most visible, we hold them up before us in the manner of shields between us and our own sense of justice.

How About Emergencies?

The excuse which is perhaps the most plausible of all and which occurs first to most people is concerned with the question of sudden emergencies. They reply to the argument, " If obedience ought to be used only as a means of securing the child's best interest, surely it should not be insisted upon as a good in itself when the interest of the child is not at all in question," by triumphantly putting an-other question. They ask with a crow of triumph: " How about emergencies? " Well, there is some-thing in that, perhaps. How about emergencies? Let us look into this. If you form the habit of explaining to a child the reasons for his obedience, if you say to him that he must not eat candy between meals, not because his father says he must not, but because it will make him sick ; if you explain to him that he must go to bed early, not because his mother has an eccentric desire that he should, but solely because it is necessary for his healthy growth; if you insist that he must eschew walking on the railroad track, not because your own taste does not run in that direction, but because children occasionally get killed on railroad tracks, will he not perhaps re-fuse to obey you on an occasion when you have no time to explain the reasons to him or when the reasons are such that he cannot understand them? This certainly has a plausible sound, and most people are quite content with it, urging that if Peter does not obey a suggestion to brush his teeth with panic-stricken alacrity he will stand on the deck of a sinking ship and argue with his parents about the advisability of jumping into a boat.

There are several remarks, to make upon this theory. The first one is that it is our duty to train the child for life, and that life is not composed of extreme emergencies, when almost any action, provided it is quick and energetic, is better than hesitation over alternatives. Life is composed of innumerable incidents in which the clear and lucid exercise of the reason is essential to good action, and for all but a minute number of experiences it is exercise in the use of his reason which the child needs. The course of our own adult life proves our instinctive sense of this need to adapt our lives to the usual rather than the very exceptional. For instance, we know perfectly well that our American wooden houses can burn down, do often burn down, and that burning is a painful way to meet death, but we do not shape all the details of our lives to avoid this dreadful possibility. We take a few reasonable precautions and trust to our resourcefulness in an emergency. We would be well laughed at by all sensible people if we should have rope ladders hanging from every window and insist that every member of the family should partake of a daily fire-drill up and down the rungs. Precautions like these might be reasonable for people working in a paint-and-oil factory, but they would quite unnecessarily embitter the life of an ordinary family living in an ordinary manner.

The conditions are precisely similar in child-life. I have no taste or capacity for elaborate mathematical computations, so that I cannot figure up the number of moments in a child's conscious life. I dare say it runs into the millions. Out of this, in the ordinary course of American life, it must be an ample allowance to guess that there may be five in which the child's welfare seriously depends upon his instant, unquestioning obedience to a sudden command, although in our safely-run settled communities there are many lives in which there occurs literally no such real emergency. But even so, how about those potential five? As an actual fact it will be found that the child who has always lived under the quiet civilized rule of avowedly rational authority will be much more quick and sure to respond to the sudden unexplained shout of command in a moment of real danger than the child who has been used to sudden unexplained shouts of command about things that did not really matter in the least. There is a certain very old story about a boy who shouted, " Wolf ! " which bears on the blunting of the sense of danger by repeated false alarms.

The ear of any human being not an imbecile can detect instantaneously the note of reality in a cry of warning or a command of necessity. The most imperious and self-willed dowager in existence would not stop to rebuke the rudeness of a workman shouting a warning to her to step back from under a descending crane. She is human; every nerve in her body would respond involuntarily to his look, his gesture, the quality of his voice. For the instant she would obey him implicitly with an obedience founded on the excellent reason that for the moment he knows better than she what is good for her, and it is apparent to her that he does. How much more does the sensitive, impressionable nature of child-hood respond instinctively to the accent of real danger, and to the authority of knowledge really greater than theirs. They no more stop to argue than we do with the conductor who suddenly runs through the train halted on a siding shouting to the passengers to get out at once. Under ordinary circumstances no one in the car would dream of ordering his life according to the dictates of that stranger in uniform, but as a matter of fact not the most stiff-necked stickler for personal independence would stop at that moment to ask on what ground he was undertaking to order people about. Without exception everybody would descend in all haste and make inquiries afterwards. And it is safe to count upon this absolutely unvarying human instinct in the case of children.

Indeed, it is not only safe to count upon this instinct, always present in the human heart, but it is much safer not to abuse it by frequent appeals to it. It is the instinct which springs up spontaneously in a real emergency. We will do well to reserve it for such occasions and not dull its keenness by trying to employ it on occasions for which it is not at all suitable. In any case such emergencies are exceptions, and rare ones, to the general rule and conduct of life, and no more invalidate the practicability of the independence of the child than the presence of policemen invalidates American self-government. Just as policemen enter hardly at all into the life of the average healthy adult, so dogmatism need enter very rarely into healthy child-life, and then as a necessary evil, to be dispensed with as soon as possible.

But there is another form of emergency in which no haste in obeying a command is necessary, but where the need is for some painful action. These are genuine emergencies which do really occur in the course of every life. Every child nowadays must go to the dentist, must take medicine, must submit to more or less cold water, must follow the doctor's rders in illness. No child likes any of these processes. Is there not danger, if the dead weight of absolute autocratic authority is removed from his will, that he will rebound into absolute refusal to undergo anything painful? This is a new case to consider. Let us begin with a statement of the ground on which autocratic authority rests. This is in all cases the possession of superior force by the person claiming the authority. The dictator of a badly-governed state uses force as his method for compelling obedience because he can without process of law send a detachment of soldiers and carry off an unruly person to prison. And yet there have been a certain number of cases of religious or political martyrs when the determination of the weaker party was sufficient to resist autocratic authority, even when enforced by the extreme of physical violence ending in death. Again, the man uses force, both mental and physical, in enforcing absolute obedience upon the horse. He uses the force and coherence of his wits to seek out the animal's weak points and he can in most cases severely hurt or even kill the horse without being hurt himself. And yet there is a certain proverb about leading a horse to water which indicates that to make him drink is beyond the power of the most violent form of authority. The autocratic authority used for the child rests exactly on the same relative inequality of mental and physical force between the person claiming authority and the person granting obedience. And the same phenomena are to be observed as in other cases of such authority. The more distasteful and painful the action to be performed, the more force is necessary to achieve obedience, until there comes a point when the pain of the action involved outweighs the pain of the penalty for disobedience, and then force is no longer operative against the determination of the weaker member.