Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters on the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home

Nothing can be more important than to seek to bring to the home some of the responsibilities with which other agencies such as school and church are today unfitly burdened. False is the charge that school and church fail to co-operate with the home. Truer is the suggestion that church and school have vainly undertaken to do that which the home must largely do. The teacher in church and school may supplement the effort of the parent but cannot and may not be asked to perform the work of parents. The school is overburdened to distraction, the church tinkers at tasks which in the nature of things must fall to parents or be left undone. And the school is attempting to become an agency for the universal relief of the home, which cannot be freed of its particular responsibilities even by the best-intentioned school or church.
Another quite obvious thesis is that conflicts arise between parents and children not during the time of the latter's infancy or early childhood but in the days of adolescence and early adulthood. The real differences—rather than the easily quelled near-rebellions of childhood—come to pass when child and parent meet on terms and conditions which seem to indicate physical and intellectual equality or its approach. I do not say that the processes of parental guidance are to be postponed until the stage of bodily and mental equivalence has been reached but that the conflicts are not begun until what is or is imagined to be the maturity of the child raises the whole problem of self-determination. The latter is a problem not of infants and juveniles but of the mature and maturing.
It may be worth while briefly to indicate the various stages or phases of the relationship of parents and children. In the earliest period, parents are for the most part youngish and children are helpless. This period usually resolves itself into nothing more than a riot of coddling. In the next stage, parents begin to approach such maturity as they are to attain, while children are half-grown reaching ten or twelve years. This is the term of unlessened filial dependence, though punctuated by an ever-increasing number of don't. In the third stage parents at last attain such maturity as is to be their own,—years and maturity not being interchangeable terms,—for, despite mounting years some parents remain infantile in mind and vision and conduct. Children now touch the outermost fringe or border of maturity in this time of adolescence, and the stage of friction, whether due to refractory children or to undeflectible parents, begins. Coddling has ended, or ought to have ended, though it may persist in slightly disguised and sometimes wholly nauseous forms. Dependence for the most part is ended, save of course for that economic dependence which does not greatly alter the problem.