Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the HomeWise, Stephen S. (Stephen Samuel)
General
Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home
Wise, Stephen S. (Stephen Samuel)
Parent and child
Let me name two types or kinds of what are held to be conflicts
between parents and children, which are not conflicts in any real
sense of the term; first, intellectual differences and, second, the
inevitable but impersonal antagonism of the two viewpoints or
attitudes which front each other in the persons of parent and child.
As for purely intellectual differences, it is well to have in mind the
world's current and suggestive use of the term "difference of
opinion"--Carlyle saying of his talk with Sterling: "Except in opinion
not disagreeing"--as if that in itself were quite naturally the
precursor of strife and conflict. If difference of opinion oft deepen
into conflict, is it not because in the home as in the world without
we have not mastered the high art of patiently hearing another
opinion? Graham Wallas[G] would urge: "A code of manners which
combined tolerance and teachability in receiving the ideas of others,
with frankness and, if necessary courageous persistence in introducing
one's own ideas.... Whether we desire that our educational system
should be based on and should itself create a general idea of our
nation as consisting of identical human beings or of indifferent human
beings" is the problem with which Wallas[H] faces us.
In the world without men may flee from one another but the walls of
the home are more narrow. And within the home-walls, for reasons to be
set forth, the merest differences of opinion, however honestly
conceived and earnestly held, may be viewed as pride of ancient
opinion on the one hand and forwardness of youthful heresy on the
other. Parents are no more to be regarded as intolerably tyrannical
because of persistence in definite opinions than children are to be
viewed as totally depraved or curelessly dogmatic because of
unrelinquishing adherence to certain viewpoints. I am naturally
thinking of normal parents, if normal they be, who would rather be
right than prevail, not of such parents as imagine that they must
never yield even an opinion, nor yet of children surly and snarling
who do not know the difference between vulgar self-insistence and high
self-reverence. For the father a special problem arises out of the
truth that the mother presides over the home as far as children are
concerned and as long as they remain children, and he steps in to
"rule" ordinarily after having failed through non-contacts to have
established a relationship with children. This is the more
regrettable because often it becomes almost the most important
business of a father, through studied or feigned neglect, to
neutralize the over-zealous attention of a mother, such attention as
makes straight for over-conventionalization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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