In the springtime of love, parents can be of significance to their children only when they feel reverence for the marvel which is accomplished in their presence. But it seldom happens that parents have previously been so sensitive that their children then treat them as perfect friends. The period of youth is commonly full of strife, which is brought about partly by the parents’ desire of remodelling their children according to their own ideas—against which children are only now venturing to defend themselves,—partly by the children’s desire to assert their own ideals, which are always different from those of the parents, for otherwise “the new generation would own no title to exist” (G. Brandes). Parents might save for themselves and for their children endless suffering, if they understood from the beginning that children are significant exclusively as new personalities, with new gods and new aims; with the right to protect their own nature, with the duty of finding out new paths, without forfeiting the right of being respected by their parents in the same degree as the latter on their side retain the right of being venerated by their children—for the best of what they are or have been, what they will or have willed. The only right that parents ought never to renounce in dealing with their grown-up children is that of giving to them the benefit of their own experience. But in so doing they must remember what a poor loving heart forgets easiest of all: that not even their own most bitter experience will be able to save their children from making sad discoveries for themselves. They will probably avoid their parents’ mistakes, but only to make others of their own! The only real power a father or mother possesses over the child’s fate—but indeed this is an immense one—is to fill the home with his or her strong and beautiful personality; with love and joy, with work and culture; and thus to make the atmosphere so rich and so pure that the children may calmly delay their choice and have a high standard to choose by. But if parents see that in spite of this their children are tempted to confuse accident with destiny, then they are called upon to show an almost godlike wisdom in order to divert the danger. In most cases, parents consciously or unconsciously play into the hands of the accidental, while they raise obstacles against what is predestined. Their warnings are not directed against what is silent and has nothing to give; no, they advance mean and paltry reasons which the young oppose with all that is best in their nature. Thus they silence their own uneasy intuitions, which their parents might have induced them to follow if they themselves had had a clearer perception of what was essential.