like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are
children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes
family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more
effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules
and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and
social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way
to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense
of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance
and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together.
=Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this
preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests
to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the
father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard
questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so
overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot
give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children
to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the
helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as
many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers,
although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger
concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all
their younger children in the hands of the mother.
What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of
which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and
its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the
child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the
real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family
table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother
and sister. These make a school of preeminent importance to the later
training.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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