The relation of mutual respect cannot obtain between parent and child as long as the instinct of parental proprietorship is dominant, as long as there is a failure to recognize that a child's individuality must be reckoned with. But there must be the underlying assumption that a child's judgment may be entitled to respect, in other words, is not inherently contemptible. Once assumed that a child may cease to be a child and become a person able to think, decide, choose, act for itself, there is no insuperable difficulty in determining when a child's judgment is entitled to respect, provided of course by way of preliminary that parents are ready to put away the pet superstition of parental infallibility and impeccability. Nothing so calculated to win a child's reverence as parental admission of fallibility generally and of some error of thought and speech in particular! One rarely hears or learns of a child who feels that parents fail to love it but one comes upon children not a few, normal beings rather than those afflicted with the persecution complex, who deeply lament the fact that parents do not treat them with the reverence owing from normal, wholesome beings to one another. It is this that more than anything else makes some children impatient of the very name, children, the term with its ceaseless implication of relative existence becoming odious to them. No one will maintain that it is easy to achieve relations of reciprocal reverence between parent and child, viewing the fact that family intimacies while tending to foster affection do not make for the strengthening of respect. For respect is most frequently evoked by the unknown and unfamiliar even as the familiar and the known, because it is known, touches the springs of affection. Parental reverence may not be unachievable, but it involves the acceptance of a child as a self-existent being, intellectually, morally, spiritually. One of the results of the liberating processes of our age is the deeping consciousness of children that they have the unchallengeable right to live their own lives, under freedom to develop their own personalities. Revolting against the superimposition of parental personality, the more deadening because childhood is imitative, they have begun to hearken to Emerson's counsel to insist upon themselves. Too often they carry their fidelity to this monition to the illegitimate length of insistence upon idiosyncracy rather than of emphasis upon personality. To cherish and defend every fleeting opinion as sacred and unamendable dogma is not insistence upon self but wilful pride of opinion. And yet even such self-insistence is better than such self-surrender as dwarfs children and by so much belittles parents.