Rural Problems of TodayGroves, Ernest R. (Ernest Rutherford)
Science
Rural Problems of Today
Groves, Ernest R. (Ernest Rutherford)
Rural conditions; Social problems
With reference to the care of children, faulty homes may be divided into
two classes. There are homes that give the children too little care and
there are homes that give them too much. The failure of the first type
of home is obvious. Children need a great deal of wise, patient, and
kindly care. Even the lower animals require, when domesticated,
considerable care from their owners, if they are to be successfully
brought from infancy to maturity. Of course children need greater care.
No one doubts this. And yet it is certainly true that there are, even in
these days of widespread intelligence, many homes where the children
obtain too little care and in one way or another are seriously
neglected.
The harmfulness of the homes that give their children too much care is
not so generally realized as is the danger of the careless and selfish
home, although, in a general way, everyone acknowledges that children
may be given too much attention. The difficulty is to determine when a
particular child is being given too much adult supervision and too
little freedom. No one would question the fact that a child can become
an adult only by a decrease of adult control and an increase of personal
responsibility. Nevertheless, in spite of a general belief that a child
needs an opportunity to win self-government, there are parents not a few
who, from love and anxiety, run into the danger of protecting and
controlling their children too much. The father or mother spends too
much time with the children. The children are pampered. Too many
indulgences are permitted them. Children in these over-careful homes are
likely to grow up neurotic, conceited, timid, babyish, daydreaming men
and women, who are of little use in the world and are often a serious
problem for normal people. Probably this second type of a deficient home
is more dangerous than the first, for children without sufficient home
care often discover a substitute for their loss, but the over-protected
children can obtain no antidote for their misfortune.
Everyone knows that attacks are increasingly being made upon the home in
its present form by people who regard it as inefficient or as an
anachronism. It is usually thought, however, that these attacks come
mostly from agitators who set themselves more or less in opposition to
all the institutions established by the present social order. Perhaps
for this reason many do not believe that the family is receiving any
serious criticism and its satisfactory functioning is therefore taken
for granted. Such an easy-going optimism is not justified, for criticism
of the home is coming from science as well as from the agitators. For
example read "The Deforming Influences of the Home," by Dr. Helen W.
Brown, which appeared in the _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ for April,
1917. She writes in one place as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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