§ 204
The father’s part in the home is something, however, far more hypersomatic than that, more spiritual. The truly husbanded wife will make the egoistic-social aspects of home-keeping so much her own business that she will tend to appropriate more than she should really have. And the thoughtless man will let her and wonder why she is tired and cross.
If rugs have to be beaten and windows washed, and there is no money to hire a man to do it, the wife will do it, frequently, and the husband, who does not husband his wife’s health and beauty will let her. And so on up the egoistic-social scale till we reach the millionaire who might do certain things for his wife much more acceptably than hirelings, but dissociates himself more and more from her.
The management of the children is really an egoistic-social affair, in which some men are much better able to plan, and execute plans than are most women. The management of very young children in the home is something that no paterfamilias can afford to leave entirely to women. This is by all odds the most important part of the child’s life.
It does not mean that the banker or politician should spend hour after hour in the nursery, though, indeed, he should know pretty well what goes on there. The nature of the personal contacts the child gets in the nursery is a determining factor in many cases, in the way in which he will later behave in his marital existence. In the nursery, meaning by that any locality where the child spends most of his playtime and sleeping time, he gets the experiences from which later he may develop neuroses, phobias, and other emotional disorders. He forms there usually his mother-imago, for even if he belongs to the class of children who never see their own mothers except on the rarest occasions, he will form his mother ideal from his hired nurse, or from any other woman with whom he comes into close contact.
Here then, the egoistic-social trends of the parents play an important rôle in determining the erotic life of the child. The egoistic-social pressure exerted on one or both parents withdraws them from their children, and partly or wholly orphans them. Many a child’s father is no more personal than a checking bank.
Not only, therefore, does the absorption of the parents by egoistic-social trends diminish the chances of their own erotic development as husband and wife, a development that takes time, energy and imagination, but it deprives their children of the proper environment in which to develop the germs of future wholesome erotism.
Parents and children should spend a certain amount of time in each other’s company during which they do nothing but love each other all around and have a jolly good time together. It is just as important for the parents to banish egoistic-social claims for short periods and actually loaf and fool around with the children as it is for the children to have a taste of adult idling company. Such, for example, is a real picnic or camping trip or ocean voyage, or any situation that brings parents and children together.