An immediate consequence of the growth of education has been a change in
the status of the child. It is no longer property, for how can one
prevent a child from pulling down the window sash at night when it knows
something of ventilation? Or give it an iron tonic when it realizes
that full-blooded people cannot take iron? The child has changed; it is
no longer the creature that, pointing to an animal in the field, said,
"What's that?" and the reply being, "A cow", asked "Why?" The child is
perilously close to asking whether the animal is carnivorous or
herbivorous. That makes coercion very difficult. But I do not think that
the modern parent desires to coerce as much as did his forbear. Rather
he desires to develop the child's personality, and in its early years
this leads to horrid results, to children being "taught to see the
beautiful" or "being made to realize the duties of a citizen." We are in
for a generation made up half of bulbous-headed, bespectacled
precocities, and half of barbarians who are "realizing their
personality" by the continual use of "shall" and "shan't." This will
pass as all things pass, the old child and the rude child, just like the
weak parent after the brute parent, and it is enough that the new
generation points to another generation, for there seldom was a time
that was not better than its father and the herald of a finer son.
Generally the parent will help, for his new attitude can be expressed in
a phrase. He does not say, "I am master", but, "I am responsible." He
has begun to realize that the child is not a regrettable accident or a
little present from Providence; he is beginning to look upon the care of
the child as a duty. He has extended the ideal of citizenship, born in
the middle of the nineteenth century, which was "to leave the world a
little better than he found it"; he has passed on to wanting his son to
be a little richer than he was, and a little more learned; he is coming
to want his son to be a finer and bolder man; he will come in time to
want his daughter to be a finer and bolder woman, which just now he
bears pretty well. His wife is helping him a great deal because she is
escaping from her home ties to the open trades and professions, to the
entertainments of psychic, political, and artistic lectures which make
of her head a waste paper basket of intellect, but still create in that
head a disturbance far better than the ancient and cow-like placidity.
The modern mother is often too much inclined to weigh the baby four
times a day, to feed it on ozoneid, or something equally funny, to
expose as much of its person as possible, to make it gaze at Botticelli
prints when in its bath. She will no doubt want it to mate eugenically,
in which she will probably be disappointed, for love laughs at Galtons;
but still, in her struggle against disease and wooden thinking, she will
have helped the child by giving it something to discard better than the
old respects and fears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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