What is thus ideally pictured is a fact in thousands of families. No
one can say that it is always best to have three generations under one
roof, but all who have had a happy family experience believe that the
grandparents should be "handy by," to use the Scotch phrase. The
grandparents' house in the country is best of all, where all family
and national holidays can be celebrated with due form and in
accordance with ancient tradition. The grandparents' house for the
city children is next best, if in a suburb near by where more space
and independence of movement are possible than in the city residence.
The grandparents' house or apartment in the same or a near-by city is,
however, not at all to be despised as a refuge when "Mother does not
understand," or "Father is so particular."
=Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families?=--Although the proverb
says, "No house was yet made large enough for two families," the
residence of one grandparent (oftener the mother than the father)
within the family circle has often proved highly successful if only a
few rules have been observed. One of these rules is that each adult
person shall have one place strictly his of her own. Another is a
rule, so difficult for some aged persons of both sexes to obey,
namely, that each person married is doubly entitled to individual
choices in action without interference even from parents, since each
such married person has to adjust his or her ideas to another person.
To work out full agreement between themselves is all that any married
couple should be expected to accomplish. Hence, in the nature of
things, the grandparents who are so near the new family that they know
and see everything have a far more difficult role to play than do the
grandparents who have their own home and simply visit and are visited.
It is, however, often a necessity of financial provision and often a
choice of ease in ministration to the needs of the aged, that brings
one grandparent or even two within the daughter's or son's household.
The time-worn jokes about the "mother-in-law" are based upon the fact
that it is more often the daughter than the son who is expected to or
needs to personally care within her own home for the mother. The son
is not so bound by social custom to take his mother in. Hence, more
husbands than wives have trials with their parents-in-law.
=Reasons Why Husbands Desert Their Families.=--The statistics of
deserting husbands, as compiled in a careful study made by Lillian
Brandt and Roger Baldwin, show that among the chief causes of "leaving
home" is "trouble with the wife's relations." In these cases it is not
only the grandmother, although she is often a member of the disturbed
family; it is also often other relatives--a sister, a brother, or a
first husband's people--who cause trouble. The wife's mother is,
however, often enough a member of the household the husband leaves
behind to give some point to the coarse and often unjust jokes
concerning the mother-in-law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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